Entrepreneurs choice in business venture: Motivations for choosing home-stay accommodation businesses in Peninsular Malaysia

Tourism is an important industry for Malaysia, and home-stay accommodation businesses play a significant role in aiding the success of the tourism industry. The aim of this paper is to analyse the start-up motivation factors and business challenges for home-stay accommodation businesses. The data were gathered from a survey of 1250 home-stay entrepreneurs in the country with a usable response rate of (n = 853) or 68.24 per cent was achieved, and was analysed descriptively. To get more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon, interviews with selected 35 home-stay accommodation entrepreneurs were also conducted. It was found that the main motivations of home-stay entrepreneurs are different to those of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) business in other sectors. The identification of motivational factors in this study provides a clearer account of what actually motivates entrepreneurs to ventures into home-stay accommodation businesses – an under researched area. The paper propose a revised model of motivations factors of home-stay accommodation entrepreneurs, which incorporates two distinct sets of push and pull factors – one that applies to the entrepreneurs of SMEs in other industry and one applies to entrepreneurs in home-stay accommodation tourism industry. The data also present the result of several key business challenges in this unique niche industry such as lack of service orientation, lack of facilities, safety concern, competition with incompliance unregistered home-stay operators and difficult to maintain optimum levels of cleanness. In addition to developing the theory on home-stay accommodation businesses, the findings of this paper will have relevance for policy making and supportive measures at the federal or state government levels to create an environment that will stimulate the competitiveness of SMEs in home-stay accommodation businesses in their attempts for business growth and key strategy for economic improvement.