Analysing the perception & satisfaction of tourism business operators towards quality certification of tourism products: case of MyTQA

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse the perception and satisfaction of tourism business operators towards tourism quality certification program particularly Malaysia Tourism Quality Assurance or MyTQA. Tourism certification is where an organisation was certified by an accreditation agency which is a third-party organisation in meeting the standards of quality product and services. MyTQA was introduced by the Ministry of Tourism, Art and Culture Malaysia (MOTAC) in uplifting the standards of delivering quality product and services by the tourism operators to the tourist and provide a form of guarantees for tourist to receive the desired experience while they travel here in Malaysia. In Malaysia, tourism certification is still new and there is no such thing as a perfect system. With that, various measures have been taken by the ministry during the development of this certification program including getting the industry on their views and overall perception towards this program. Certification program requires feedback from the industry to ensure that the program is widely accepted and many operators are willing to participate and get certified. However, that was not the case when it comes to MyTQA. Since its establishment until 2019, only 63 tourism business operators were certified by this program compared to more than 4000 registered tourism business under the ministry. This clearly deserve an explanation and a dive into that have cause this certification program were not so supported by the industry was undeniably necessary. What have caused this slow uptake and whether there were factors that affect their buy-in towards this program were identified. With that, the perception and satisfaction of the 63 MyTQA certified tourism business operators were collected in order to fully understand the issue and in the end looking upon recommendations for the future revision of this program. The certified tourism operators were chosen because we want to compare their initial perception with their satisfaction level regarding this program. In order to do that, importance-performance analysis (IPA) have been chosen to analyse their perception-satisfaction level where the output of this analysis is a two-dimensional matrix which can help to identify the attributes which have caused the slow buy-in among the operators. A questionnaire was developed and distributed through online platform using Google Form where it was delivered through electronic mail (e-mail). In the questionnaire, their liker-scale was used to measure the level of importance and satisfaction of the operators based on a 5-level ranking. The raw data were then transcribed into means and the GAP analysis were used to identify if there is significance between the importance and satisfaction of the operators based in the sets of attributes generated from the various literature review, In the end, it is clear which attribute have caused the nature of slow uptake by the operators towards MyTQA certification program and recommendations were presented based on the level of importance and satisfaction collected.