Destination Image towards Revisit Intention to Natural Protected Areas in Sarawak: A Study of Functional Characteristics

Ecotourism is one of the major motives in tourism development through this advancing digitalized world. Moreover, the government is looking forward to seeing an opportunity to enhance attractiveness of ecotourism creation through the Visit Truly Asia Malaysia 2020 initiative. Furthermore, the sustainability of destination image should be established in a way that significantly increases the revisit intention of tourists. This study is to examine the relationship between the functional characteristics of destination image and revisit intention, namely, natural and historical attractions, entertainment and tourism activities, and tourism infrastructure as well as price and value. A total of 283 respondents comprising tourists both local and foreign tourists visited Gunung Mulu National Park, Gunung Gading National Park, Bako National Park, Kubah National Park and Niah National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia took part voluntarily in this study. In the evalutation of the developed model, WarpPLS 7.0 was implemented based on path modelling and bootstrapping to obtain the estimation of standard error and p-values. Interestingly, the findings revealed that only price and value had a significant positive impact on tourists' revisit intention, whereas no significant impact found among natural and historical attractions, entertainment and tourism activities, and tourism infrastructure. Implications of these results will be further discussed.