THE PREDICTORS OF SPORTS TOURISM INVOLVEMENT IN MALAYSIA: AN EXTREME SPORT OVERVIEW

Purpose of Study: Malaysian tourism sector has widened its scope by venturing into extreme sports tourism. With this new development, tourism opportunities are created and boosting the Malaysian tourism industry growth. The study highlights the development of extreme sports destination that closely related to international and tourists’ involvement and preferences in Malaysia. The purpose of this paper is to determine the predictors of sports tourism involvement in Malaysia from the extreme sports perspective. Specifically, it is going to investigate the possible significant predictors that possibly influenced the international or local tourists’ preferences in choosing Malaysia as their preferred extreme sports tourism destination. This study is restricted to international or local tourists who participated or going to participate in extreme sports activities in Malaysia. Methodology: This study proposes a theoretical framework that is developed based on the review of past researches and literatures. We identified five factors that possibly influenced international tourists or local tourists to choose Malaysia as their extreme sports tourism destination simultaneously involved in such activities. Those predictors are event popularity and entertainment, economics (costs and expenses), facilities and infrastructures, social, and environmental impact. Results: The proposed hypotheses predicted a significant and positive relationship exists between event popularity and entertainment, economics (costs and expenses), facilities and infrastructures, social, and environmental impact towards the tourist involvement and sports tourism development in Malaysia. For the future research, we proposed to further conduct an empirical analysis to test these hypotheses. Implications/Applications: This study could help tourism sectors to explore opportunities for development particularly in the extreme sports sectors in Malaysia.  This study is also useful for researchers, students, tourism operators, tourism sectors, government and society because it could increase the involvement of international tourist or local into the extreme sports activities in Malaysia.