The effects of perceived conference quality on attendees’ behavioural intentions

ABSTRACT

We examined the relationships between dimensions of perceived quality, attendees’ needs and behavioural intentions in conferences. Our findings are based on SEM-PLS of a convenience sample of 295 international attendees participated in 14 academic conferences in Malaysia. We find that only accessibility and self-congruity are positively associated with behavioural intentions. Perceived conference quality is associated with the attendees’ needs and in turn, influences the strength of behavioural intentions. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our model. This study may also give benefits to conference planners with information that allows them to attract and retaining repeat attendees.

KEYWORDS:

• Conference quality
• attendees’ needs
• behavioural intentions
• conference
• Malaysia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shiva Hashemi

Shiva Hashemi holds a PhD in Tourism Business and Marketing in the School of Housing, Building and Planning at Universiti Sains Malaysia, in 2018. Her research interests include convention tourism, culinary tourism, hospitality, event as well as tourism business and marketing. Her research accomplishments in the past five years are demonstrated in several articles published in international journals and presented at international conferences.

Azizan Marzuki

Azizan Marzuki is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Universiti Sains Malaysia. His research interest areas are community participation, carrying capacity, social impact assessment, convention tourism, hospitality, urban planning, and development. He has published articles in several top-tier tourism journals. His current projects are carrying capacity in tourism, beach morphology and nature-based tourism and an integrated Malay traditional healing village.

Husam Jasim Mohammed

Husam Jasim Mohammed is Senior Lecturer at Imam Ja'afar Al-sadiq University, Department of Business Administration. He graduated his Ph.D. in 2017 from the Department of Decision Sciences, School of Quantitative Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). His research interests are Operational Research in terms of using more advanced optimization techniques. My area of research is focused on decision science especially in quantitative science for decision making and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM).

Shaian Kiumarsi

Shaian Kiumarsi is a Post-Doctoral at the Graduate School of Business (GSB), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). He holds a PhD in Business Information Technology (BIT) from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). He is interested in business IT, service innovation, marketing, tourism and energy. His current research focus is on innovation and operations management. He has several journal articles and conference presentations to his record.