Booster of Rural Tourism’s Competitiveness: Stakeholders’ Involvement as A Moderator

Tourism competitiveness of a destination has been greatly influenced by several factors, two of the factors selected under this study is community support and community knowledge. However, the limelight shines on the moderating role of stakeholders' involvement on the relationships between the destination competitive advantage and its factors. This is the first study that has adopted the stakeholders' involvement as a moderating variable to test on the moderating impact on the relationships. The lacking of development has indeed decreased the competitive level to host destination. Past studies have researched on the relationships of community support and community knowledge with destination competitiveness; this study has introduced the stakeholders' involvement into the framework as moderator, in which it has been modified according to the resource-based view (RBV) theory to test the moderating impact on the former variables.A total of 223 sets of questionnaires were successfully collected for analysis Both Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 23.0 and SmartPLS(version 3.2.7) were used for analysis. Interestingly, the findings revealed that both community support and knowledge impact were statistically proven in significantly related to rural tourism destination competitive advantage. The implications of the study were further discussed.