TOWARDS EQUITY IN HOMESTAY TOURISM

Abstract

Mass tourism has been criticized as being exploitative and indifferent to the needs of the local communities visited by tourists. In response, alternative forms of tourism have been rapidly gaining traction across the world in recent years. These “alternative tourisms” advocate mutually beneficial outcomes for both tourists and host communities by encouraging and allowing tourists to go beyond the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) commonly associated with mass tourism. This paper focuses on community-based rural homestay tourism – a form of alternative tourism that is becoming popular amongst rural communities but has received minimal attention in the academic literature. Despite having altruistic intentions, the success that community-based rural homestay tourism has had in achieving its intended objective of equitable tourism development is questionable. On that note, academic studies in tourism have tended to focus on the negative impacts of such a tourism initiative. Consequently, there is a notable lack of interest in exploring the difficulties involved in achieving the altruistic objectives intended by such alternative tourism initiatives. This paper is an attempt to fill this void through an empirical study on a community-based rural homestay tourism initiative in Ba’Kelalan, Sarawak. A key altruistic objective of community-based tourism is to bring equitable benefits to the community as a whole – this prevents feelings of jealousy from developing within the host community. However, in-depth interviews with homestay operators in Ba’Kelalan suggest that benefits from tourism are only conferred upon a small group of homestay operators. This paper explores the reasons for this inequity and provides some recommendations to encourage more equitable outcomes in Ba’Kelalan’s homestay tourism venture.