The State of Tourism Research in Malaysia

Abstract

Tourism is becoming one of the most important sectors of the Malaysian economy. Malaysia has been very successful in attracting a large number of international tourists through aggressive promotional efforts worldwide. The boom for Malaysian tourism started in the early 1990s, after the success of the two Visit Malaysia Year campaigns in 1990 and 1994. Despite the economic downturns and the H1N1 scare, Malaysia attracted 23.65 million international tourists in 2009. While a great deal of attention has been paid to building up tourist infrastructure, the development of new products, and promotion, less attention has been given to research in tourism. This may be because tourism has mainly been a government-led sector and because some top-down decisions are politically influenced and are not necessarily economically sound. In this paper, past and present trends of tourism research activities in Malaysia have been analyzed. The state of tourism research, especially among institutions of higher learning, has been explored in this paper. Directions for future research as well as gaps in research to be explored by future researchers have been identified in this paper.