Defining and Exploring the Dimensionality of ‘Halal-Hotel’ Concept

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33102/jcicom.vol2no1.46

Islamic tourism highlights the growing importance of what for many may be an untapped and unknown market. With one billion followers across 57 countries, Islam’s role in tourism is important to tourism and hospitality managers in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Consequently, government policies, strategies and programs have laid undue emphasis on the growth of ‘Halal-Hotel’; a total Islamic accommodation standard that prescribes by Islamic rules. Halal is fast gaining worldwide recognition and this is not merely because the Muslim Ummah is growing in number, but more significantly, because halal is being recognized as a new benchmark for safety and quality assurance. Unfortunately, there are ambiguities pertaining the criteria for ‘halal hotel’ in the hotel sector because the lack of consensus among stakeholders within the Muslim-friendly tourism and hospitality (MFT) sector in Malaysia. Furthermore, The translation of Arabic-Islamic terminology into Malay language may offer its advantages as well as challenges to all relevant tourism stakeholders within the Muslim-friendly tourism and hospitality (MFT) sector in Malaysia. In terminology translation, equivalents in the target language are usually preferred to be as concise as possible and able to maintain existing morphological and semantic relationship between the translated terms and other morphologically and semantically related source language terms. Moreover, researchers and hotel operators have struggled to arrive to an agreement as to what is the most appropriate term or concept that could best and comprehensively describe a hotel that operates according to the Islamic rules and regulations. Therefore, this research aims to identify the dimensionality of ‘halal hotel’ concepts and to explore the suitability of adopting the ‘halal hotel’ as the term to be use among the Muslim-friendly tourism and hospitality (MFT) sector in Malaysia. A qualitative research method is chosen to conduct this research, and the samples are from the stakeholders which consist of Islamic scholars, hotel operator and the hotel’s guest.