Meeting Customer Expectations in Islamic Tourism: Effects of Islamic Business Ethics

Introduction

Tourism has a magical potential for generating revenue owing to the fact that it is a quick-growing sector and has broad economic, social, cultural and environmental consequences (Giaoutzi and Peter Nijkamp 2006). Worldwide, we can talk about an ever increasing geographic and psychological spread and diversification of touristic activities (Donyadide 2010). More and more people benefit from a widely diversified set of tourism products. Moreover, it has become a highly competitive industry making pressure on tourism professionals to differentiate their products in order to reach higher levels of profitability and increase their revenue (Donyadide 2010). That is why many countries display an inclination towards encouraging this unique industry wherein entrepreneurs can earn maximum output with the least possible R&D and technological investments.

Nowadays, continuous innovation and the ability to improve existing products, services and business processes have become very important to catch up with the latest developments (Baykal, 2019b). In this context, innovation should be conceived as the competency of modern organizations in developing novel ideas and products, with the aim of gaining new and advantageous positions in the market or strengthening their existing positions in their current markets. In an organizational sense, innovation can be regarded as a useful and challenging production of organizations with an innovation that has never been done before (Baykal 2019). In this point, halal tourism or in other words Islamic tourism can be considered as a new product of Muslim market including myriad tangible products and services with increasing number of tourists. In fact, global halal tourism market can be viewed as one of the most growing industries (Albayrak and Özkul 2014). It is a tourism type that is in alignment with Islamic principles (Tekin 2014). In halal tourism a holistic approach is embraced encompassing halal food, halal recreation, and even halal finance.

Actually, tourism encompasses all kinds of visits including travelling leisure, business and other purposes. Similarly, Islamic tourism can be explained as all kind of activities of Muslims that can be observed while travelling and staying in places apart from their usual environment that are mostly originating from or shaped by Islamic motivations and sensitivities. Before the development of Islamic tourism, many sensitive Muslims had difficulty in meeting their holiday needs and had to give up their holiday demands. However, with the development of Islamic tourism, many people with a high level of Islamic sensitivity began to take a comfortable holiday, but the emergence of this form of tourism has brought with it many ethical issues that need to be addressed.