Developing a model for Islamic hotels: Evaluating opportunities and challenges

Despite the increasing trend of international visitors from lslamic countries particularly from the Middle East to Malaysia, efforts by hotels to customize their products and services to these target customers are still insufficient. In fact, there is no established business model for Islamic hotel either in academic literature or even in practice. The current practices are merely focusing on Halal food certification while the other lslamic aspects of hotel operations still remain undiscovered.The increasing numbers of international visitiors create a bright prospect for this industry, but these opportunities come with huge challenges.Therefore, this paper aims to discuss the opportunities, issue and challenges in the process of developing the model of lslamic hotels in Malaysia.Past and current literature is used to support our arguments.We found the growing number of Muslim population and Muslim travelers will continue to flourish this market segment.On the hand, these opportunities come with challenges.These challenges are related to the measurement of Islamic hotel, and the acceptance and the implementation of the concept among hoteliers and consumers