Creating a Sustainable Tourism Business Model for Small-scale Tourism Products in Malaysia: Embracing Tourism Opportunity for Post-pandemic Resilience

The tourism business is battling to survive in 2019 due to travel restrictions, border closures, and the closure of most services. The pandemic is having a more severe impact on small-scale tourism products than on others. Therefore, it is urgent to introduce new elements into business models to assist these operators in maintaining operations and sustaining their products. Given that most revenue in the tourism industry comes from small-scale products that directly benefit local communities, tourism operators need to identify the key elements of their business model. The current nine elements of the small-scale business model are the customer segments, value proposition, revenue streams, channels, customer relationships, key activities, key resources, key partners, and cost structure. However, these small-scale tourism operators must add new components to their business strategies for product sustainability to remain competitive today. Hence, the goals of this study were addressed by using the qualitative technique as the research design. Ten informants, including tourism representatives and operators from Johor, Kedah, and Negeri Sembilan, participated in this semi-structured interview. Using NVivo, data were coded, translated as necessary, and transcribed. The content was analysed according to thematic analysis. The new main components of the business model are professional guidance, facilities, travel experience, information delivery, stakeholder collaboration, product management and risk management to guarantee the viability and resilience of small-scale tourism operators. These new findings can assist tourism operators in sustaining their products.