International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences volume 4 issue 5 pp. 194-202 doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.20469/ijhss.4.10001-5 Perceptions and Preferences of Muslim Domestic Tourists in Indonesia as a Halal Tourism Destination (Case Study: Halal Tourism in West Java) Damara Saputra Siregar * Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia Abstract: This paper aims to explore the implementation of halal tourism development through the perceptions and preferences of tourists on halal tourism in West Java. The type of research is descriptive with a quantitative approach. Data collection techniques in this paper are randomly distributing questionnaires to 100 respondents (tourists). Dimen- sions assessment of perceptions and preferences of respondents to halal tourism in West Java is adopted from indicators put forward by Global Muslim Traveler Index 2016 with Likert scale. Then, calculate the value of quality and averages, analyzed by gap analysis and quadrant analysis. Based on the results, the study found the gap analysis, which shows that there is still a gap in all variables between the perceptions and preferences of tourists to halal tourism in West Java. While the quadrant analysis results show that some variables have low performance whereas the level of influence is high, some variables with a high level of influence followed by good performance, some variables that have a low level of influence and the performance are not good, and the variable that the influence level is low but its performance is good. Keywords: Tourism, halal tourism, Muslim domestic tourists, perceptions, preferences Received: 23 June 2018; Accepted: 10 August 2018; Published: 12 October 2018 INTRODUCTION Muslims population in the world is growing up year by year. In 2010 the world’s Muslim population reached 23.4% and was expected to reach 24.9% by 2020, 26.4% by 2030 (Pew Research Center, 2011). Therefore, Halal lifestyle trends as part of the world’s Islamic economic industry also increased, one of them in the tourism sector. The new concept of tourism that caters to the holidays by adjusting the lifestyle, needs and requests of Muslim tourists began to be known by the term of halal tourism. Halal tourism is the form of tourism for Muslims who prefer to utilize services, facilities and activities compliant with Islamic principles. Based on reports from Master Card Crescent Rating Muslim Shopping Travel Index released in 2017, the number of Muslims who travel in 2016 reached 121 million. This number grew by 3.3% from the previous year’s 117 million. With spending reached USD 155 billion in 2017 and estimated at the US $200 billion in 2020. Indonesia as a country with the largest Muslim majority in the world amounted to 207,176,162 (Pew Research Center, 2010) capturing this trend as an opportunity to increase the number of tourists visit. Indonesia should have seen this as an opportunity because Indonesia has enough potential (Bariscil, 2017; Samori, Salleh, & Khalid, 2016). In 2017 the number of foreign tourists to Indonesia to Indonesia reached 2.7 million or an increase of 22% of the total number of foreign tourists in 2016. At the same time, Muslim tourists reached 228 million from 260 million domestic tourists in * Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Damara Saputra Siregar, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia. E-mail: damarasiregar@gmail.com c  2018 The Author(s). Published by KKG Publications. This is an Open Access article distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.