Establishing Shariah-compliance hotel characteristics from a Muslim needs perspective - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 528

requirements for restaurant to be Halal certified
are not friendly to hospitality industry, and these
resulting difficulties for hotels to apply. Majority
of the respondents have the same opinion that
JAKIM needs to simplify the process and require-
ment of obtaining Halal certificate. Respondent
A and B highlighted that currently, JAKIM is
addressing this issues and continuous discussion
among stakeholders of hospitality industry is
going on to improve the Halal application system.
This move will boost Malaysia image as one of top
tourist country among Muslim tourists for exam-
ple from Middle East.

5 CONCLUSION

The universal standard of SCH is urgently needed
to encourage more hotels in Malaysia to seriously
consider applying it in their operations. The benefits
of SCH are many, one of it is SCH could be a com-
petitive advantage for the hotel as the demand on
Islamic goods and services are increasing. In addi-
tion, the influx of Middle East tourists to Malaysia
provides immense opportunities for SCH hotels to
be able to attract these tourists to stay in their hotels
and help to increase their profits. As mentioned ear-
lier, the Middle East tourists are a lucrative market
because they spend more than other tourists.
Nevertheless, the decision to adopt SCH must
be made as according to the hotel's target market
so as not to affect their financial gain. The com-
position of hotel's target market should determine
whether the hotel should apply basic SCH or full
service SCH. Therefore, the application of SCH
needs a careful consideration for hotel operated
in a multiracial country like Malaysia. Future
research may need to address this issue from the
perspective of profit gained and innovation serv-
ices addressing different religious needs in apply-
ing SCH in Malaysia.
As a conclusion, this paper identified several
issues in relation to the practice of SCH including
the government regulation, difficulties to obtain
Halal certification and the increasing need of SCH
standard. This paper ended by proposing the char-
acteristics of SCH for practice in Malaysia. The
proposed characteristics of SCH are based on the
Muslim travelers' needs and the hotel services for
SCH (Table 2).

4.3 Shariah compliant hotel standard
The absence of Shariah-compliant standard is
an important category emerged in this study. As
respondent B highlighted, “Many hotels claimed
that they are SCH without understand the term
Shariah itself. They promote SCH as their market-
ing strategy but not as the genuine concept of the
hotels. In my opinion, the SCH concept should
be developed based on the Islamic perspective of
doing business and not as a tag line in the promo-
tion campaign”. Another respondent explained
that, “in our hotel, we adopted two Malaysia
Standards such as MS1500:2009 (Malaysian Stand-
ard of Halal Food-Production, Preparation, Han-
dling and Storage by JAKIM) and MS1900:2005
(Malaysian Standard for Quality Management
System-Requirements from Islamic Perspectives)
to implement SCH”. In contrast, respondent E
mentioned that, “the Shariah-compliant concept is
only applicable in the restaurant”. It is clear that
hotels implement varied concept of SCH in Malay-
sia. Thus, it is timely for a government to consider
developing a standard guideline for SCH.

Table 2. The proposed characteristics of SCH.

4.4 Muslim needs perspective SCH model
The respondents were asked on the suitability of
SCH model established for this study and major-
ity of them agreed it should be based on the Mus-
lim needs. All of the respondents highlighted that
the application of MS1500:2009 which is Malay-
sian Standard of Halal Food-Production, Prepa-
ration, Handling and Storage (Halal certification
by JAKIM) could be used as a tool to apply SCH
into practice. In addition, one respondent sug-
gested that the MS1900:2005 which is Malaysian
Standard for Quality Management System-Re-
quirements from Islamic Perspectives could be
adopted in implementing SCH in the hotel opera-
tion. Thus the development of SCH model in
Malaysia should be based on the Muslim's needs
and include several standards like MS1500:2009
and MS1900:2005.

Source : Original