Creative tourism experience of tourist in Kiulu Farmstay, Sabah

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the factors creative tourism experience of tourist in Kiulu Farmstay Sabah. Many researchers have looked at the tourist travel pattern and creative experience in the different context of tourism industry especially in rural area. Authentic, new and memorable experience is crucial for the long-term in order to sustain the business of tourism sector and its competitive advantage, especially in the context of creative tourism destination. Where tourist are not familiar and being exposed about this new innovation of tourism especially in Malaysia itself. Hence, this research will investigate and highlighting Kiulu Farmstay as one of the potential creative tourism destination is this place coukd meet the characteristics of creative tourism or not. In order to know the result, four factors of creative tourism experience which include consciousness/awareness, needs/motivations, creativity, and learning and intercting are used too measured tourists’ opinions about creative experience in Kiulu Farmstay. And to make this data being collected succesfully, quantitative analysis approach has been applied in this research. The data were collected from 87 tourist who stayed or have been stayed in Kiulu Farmstay. From this research, resulted that creativity factor is the most influential factor for tourist to travel in Kiulu Farmstay, also from the overall findings conclude that, tourist pattern and level of travel based on the theory of Pine & Gilmore (1998) shows tourist in Kiulu Farmstay are more to educational level. Where most f them, go to Kiulu Farmstay to seek and gain knowledge from the activities that they participate in. However, even creativity has been identified as the most influential factor, but the other factors also contains an element that supports the factors of creative experience of tourist. This research provides insightful data on tourist creative experience that can be utilized by Kiulu Farmstay in Sabah as well as other rural destinations to enance their products, services and market segmentation.