DESTINATION PERCEPTION 72

As inferred earlier, perception is ‘the acquisition and processing of sensory information in order to see, hear, taste, smell, or feel objects in the world’ and more importantly, it ‘guides an organism’s actions with respect to those objects’ (Sekuler & Blake, 2002, p. 621).

Perception has the ability to initiate behavioural activities and this has a major implication in tourism. On one hand, the choice of destination emerges from needs and desires for travel driven by capacity and taste. On the other hand, the destination choice is also influenced by the opportunities/products offered by available destinations to fulfil such needs and desires. Destination image is a mixture of positive and negative perceptions of different aspects of a tourist destination and this represents tourism reality. These perceptions are “likely to be critical elements in the destination choice process, regardless of whether or not they are true representations of what that place has to offer” (Um &Crompton, 1990, p.433). By studying travellers’ perceptions of the destination, tourism marketers may be able to understand and predict the consumption behaviour of travellers towards the destination. The popular topics which are related to destination perception include its role in determining purchasing behaviour of travellers, satisfaction and destination positioning (Chon, 1990; Gallarza et al., 2002). One of the gaps that this research aims to fill is to establish if there are any differences between the perceptions of Muslims and Non-Muslims.

Cultural differences may reflect on the destination perceptions. According to (MacKay, 2000), target market countries represent different cultures. At the same

time, image perception may vary between cultures. The author suggests use of multidimensional scaling analysis to identify such perception differences.

As was discussed above, often countries are considered as representing different cultures. The Crotts & Erdmann (2000) classification of countries was based on cultural distance. Thus several findings suggested that perceptions of destinations may vary according to their country of origin. Perception of destination attributes by British and German tourists to Mallorca and Turkey differed in the findings of Kozak (2002). The British gave more importance to accommodation, weather and cost. Germans gave more importance to weather, sea beaches and cost. However, there are no appreciable cultural differences between the two countries (Crotts & Erdmann, 2000). Therefore, these are mere country differences not attributable to culture. Significant differences in destination perceptions of Japanese and Koreans about Guam were observed by (Lee & Back, 2007). In this case too, the two countries are culturally not very distant as per Hofstede. A clearer picture was provided by Crotts & Erdmann (2000) using the Hofstede model. They obtained only very limited indication of national cultural differences influencing customer perceptions, willingness to revisit and recommend to others. Thus, national cultural differences are only one of the many factors affecting perception and consumer decision making.

In a different type of comparison, Baloglu & McCleary (1999) compared destination image of US visitors to Turkey, Egypt, Greece and Italy. Cognitive, affective and overall image were captured in the survey. Significant differences among destinations revealed their relative strengths and weaknesses in competition with other destinations. Greece and Turkey have the same cultural distance score and Italy and Egypt are two separate cultural entities and are also different from both Greece and Turkey. In a study by Yu & Ko (2012) perceptions of Korea as a medical tourism destination by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean tourists is examined. The three groups differed in their perceptions of factors of choice, discomfort and preferred products. Koreans emphasised selection factors. The Japanese stressed inconveniences related to medical and care services, stay and cost, information and insurance aspects. The Chinese also stressed stay and cost. The Chinese preferred light treatments. Japanese preferred major treatments. However, the cultural distance between China and Japan is not very great.

Local tourists may have place attachment as they operate in the same cultural environment, but not for a different cultural group (Hou, Lin, & Morais, 2005). In a widely differing cultural context of tourists from the UK and Japan, Hou, O'leary, Morrison, and Gong-Soog (2005) observed very different travel motives and benefit seeking patterns between the two groups. As the two countries have high cultural distance, separate destination images need to be used for the two markets. In the studies of Baloglu & McCleary (1999), Americans were satisfied in comparison with other tourists, but the Taiwanese wanted an apology for service failures at destinations. Repeating instances of service failures can lead to poor impressions about the destination and thus affect favourable decision making.

Information on destinations through multimedia can affect people from different countries in different ways. This was demonstrated by Hudson & Gil (2011). A film shown primarily about South America, elicited differences in the items which attracted viewers from Canada, the USA and Spain. People who were motivated to travel were influenced by the scenery, landscape and the culture of South America. There could be individual differences among tourists from the same culture in the perception of a destination. Often patterns could be found among these individual perceptions, which could be categorised into groups. Prayag & Hosany (2014) categorised UAE youths into three groups, enthusiasts, unconvinced and convivial, with respect to their perception about visiting Paris as a luxury destination. In another work (Prayag & Ryan, 2011) noted national differences had a strong relationship with cognitive and affective images, and specific visit motivations of international tourists visiting Mauritius. Post-Olympics 2008 at Beijing, the destination image of China among Americans did not change (Chiang, 2009), although certain subgroups had different levels of susceptibility to perception change.