The Importance Of Educational Tourism

In general, the determinant of demand is derived from the consumer behaviour theory, where it can be differentiated between economic factors and non-economic factors. The economic factors consist of the price and income that are commonly employed in the tourism demand studies. Theoretically, if the price of educational tourism at the destination country increases, the possibility for the demand for educational tourism to the destination country will decrease. Moreover, the price-quantity demanded also provided information with regards to the sensitivities of educational tourists towards the living standard in the destination country. Which means, how international students react to the increase in the price of educational tourism. Here, the

Studies by Eilat and Einav (2004) and Daryaei et al. (2014) show that the institutional quality would likely affect the inflow of foreign visitors. The institutional quality includes the perception of individuals about a good governance of the destination country, such as law enforcement, politically stable and the government effectiveness in making any policy decisions. In this respect, there is should be a positive relationship with the inflow of international student. For example, the effectiveness of any policies implemented by the government that favour to the inbound of international student would attract a greater number of international students coming to Malaysia. These include the application procedures and processing, the issuance of student visa, permissions of working part-time and monitoring the private higher education institutions so that they follow the benchmark of the standard and quality by the Malaysian quality agency. Other than that, possible factors that detriment a good image of the destination country are the impact from the political instability in the destination country (Seddighi, Nuttall, and Theocharous, 2001). International students will avoid country that having chaotic situation, that potentially affect their own safety. Therefore, it is important to include this factor into the

As elaborated by Hofstede (1980), different citizens of the country have different perception and satisfaction towards different destination. In fact, the influence of cultures on consumer behavior is evident in all areas of services, especially in the fields of travel and tourism (Manrai and Manrai, 2011). The individualism and collectivism cultural dimension is a reference to measure how strength the tie between individuals and their communities. For example, people from the collectivism countries might place higher factor in their social community sizes at the destination country while students from the individualism country might emphasize other factors than their own communities at the destination country. This contributes in shaping the size of the origin communities in the foreign country. Thus, apart from the mentioned potential determinants, this study proposes another cultural dimension as one of the determinants in the educational tourism demand