ABSTRACT
This paper explores the attributes of social media and investigates the impact towards decision to travel to Malaysia. Furthermore, this study explored the tourist perception of Malaysia as an Islamic destination. The sample of this study was inbound international tourists, mainly from the African, Asian, Australian, European and American continents. Convenience sampling was applied and the questionnaire instrumentations were adopted from tourism literatures. Reliability test, descriptive analysis and multiple regressions were used to explore the relationship between the variables. This paper found that communication and virtual tour presentation have significant effect towards tourist decision to visit Malaysia as an Islamic destination. However, the second hypothesis was rejected as the relationship between information and tourist decision was found to be insignificant. This paper benefited the government and tourism related bodies in terms of understanding the inbound tourists’ profiles and the effect of social media, which in return would help them in developing better promotional policies in endorsing Malaysia as an Islamic destination.
