The Impact of Natural Resources, Cultural Heritage, and Special Events on Tourism Destination Competitiveness: The Moderating Role of Community Support

Abstract

Tourism destination competitiveness has been proven as one of the crucial factors to improve the performance of rural tourism destination.It is important for a tourism destination to possess the uniqueness of rural destinations in term of its nature, culture and ethnics because these are the factors that attract tourists' attention and intention to visit.Hence, this study intends to investigate the impacts of natural resources, cultural heritage, and special events on tourism destination competitiveness from the tourists' perspective.Moreover, this is the first known study to adopt community support as the moderating variable to examine its moderating impact among the constructs.A total of 210 respondents had completed the questionnaires.To assess the developed model, SmartPLS (version 3.2.6) is applied based on path modeling and then bootstrapping.The results revealed that natural resources, cultural heritage, and special events are significantly and positively correlated to tourism destination competitiveness from tourists' perspective.Surprisingly, community support was found to be no moderating relationship among the constructs.The implications, limitations, and directions for future research are further discussed.