Response Model for Tourism Entrepreneurs :Empirical Exploration Based on Marketing Entrepreneurial Value (Study on Tourism Industry)

Abstract

Aceh province has been developing the potential halal tourism which expected to be the unique brand tourism and as a form of both concern and care from the government in managing Aceh’s tourism industry. This was proven by several awards achieved by Aceh in 2016 for the best halal tourist destination area in the World Halal Tourism Award; which are the World’s Best Halal Cultural Destination award and World’s Best Airline for Halal Travellers. This research focus on the study on improving the business performance of the entrepreneurs in Aceh tourism by utilizing competitive advantage, with the trigger variables includes entrepreneurial orientation, halal orientation, and marketing orientation. The location of this particular study is the tourism destination area at four regencies/ cities: Simeulue, Aceh Besar, Banda Aceh, and Sabang. The population of this research is the tourism entrepreneurs at these four regencies/ cities, while the respondents are the owner/ director and manager of these tourism companies which includes 400 respondents from 300 tourism entrepreneurs. Data analyzing tool used in this research was quantitative analysis by adopting methods such as CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), SEM (Structural Equation Model) with AMOS and SPSS for the descriptive analysis.

The result of this study indicates that the business performance of tourism entrepreneurs in Aceh is affected significantly by variables, such as Entrepreneurial Orientation, Halal Orientation, Market Orientation and Competitive Advantage. As an additional note, as far as this research is being conducted there is no other research in Indonesia generally and Aceh specifically which study the influence of halal orientation to the business performance in tourism or relating it with the Competitive Advantage variable. Therefore, it is recommended to further continue the study regarding these variables: Halal Orientation, Competitive Advantage and Business Performance in both empirical qualitative and quantitative analysis for the tourism sector.