LETTERS: Homestays offer tourists stays with a host family, and to interact and experience the daily life of the family, while learning the culture and lifestyle of rural Malaysia.
Homestays offer activities that revolve around local lifestyle and experience, including cultural and economic activities, as well as environmental preservation.
The majority of homestays are owned and operated by people in rural communities.
There are 223 homestays registered in Malaysia. Before the pandemic in 2019, Malaysian homestays generated RM29,662,211.60 in revenue from 458,899 touristsme.
It's true that compared with large tourism organisations, most smaller establishments, such as homestays, fall behind in their marketing efforts.
Most homestay operators have yet to grasp the systematic way of effective marketing, particularly in digital marketing.
Hence, to be competitive and at a par with other tourism products that Malaysia has to offer, it is crucial for homestay operators to understand the importance of setting goals and having a strategy to grow.
An effective strategy starts with Planning a RACE, short for Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.
Planning begins with the homestay operators defining their goals and strategy.
Here, it is important for operators to understand the market, be aware of what their competitors are doing and, most importantly, to know their strengths and weaknesses.
SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis come in handy in this phase as it allows operators to identify the opportunities and threats that they may face.
This will help them focus on certain areas and develop their goals. Having decided what goals to achieve, the homestay operators then enters the RACE.
It starts with Reach, where operators work on reaching out to tourists by building awareness of their brand name, product and services.
At this stage, it is important to identify and utilise digital platforms that are effective in reaching out to the target customers.
In ACT, operators work on increasing interaction with their target customers, as well as stimulate target customers intention to follow or subscribe to the homestays webpage or social media accounts.
It is important to create a valuable and pleasant customer journey to make the customer interested to know more about the homestays.
This can be done by sharing interesting information about the homestay, as well as positive reviews by previous guests.
Next is CONVERT, the stage where target customers turn into paying customers, which means that they have made the decision to purchase the homestay products and services.
At this stage, it is important to provide a simple booking method and various payment options to ease transactions.
Finally, the ENGAGE phase is where operators must maintain a good relationship with their customers with the aim to encourage repeat business.
Therefore, the operators must keep adding value to their homestay product and services in order to maintain the relationship with their customers and keep them interested to continue following and subscribing.
Clearly, this Planning a RACE strategy cannot be done overnight, and need time to show results.
It needs perseverance and hard work for homestay operators to keep improving their products and services as well as continue to enhance their knowledge on how to improve their strategy to success.
CYNTHIA ROBERT DAWAYAN
Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Business and Management, UiTM, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times