Muslim Friendly Tourism:
Regulating Accommodation Establishments
In the OIC Member Countries
18
The diversity of approaches to conventional quality ratings suggests that flexibility may be a
key success factor for MFT standards. However, while there is no single “correct” approach to
developing quality standards for accommodation establishments, what follows is an attempt
to obtain some insights from the conventional standard landscape to guide future MFT
standard development and implementation. 15
2.1 Current Global and Regional Initiatives for Standardization of Services
The global landscape for hotel quality standards is fragmented with many variations between
standards in terms of measured criteria, certification, and whether it is mandatory or not for
accommodation establishments to follow these standards. As for certification and audit
processes, where required, they typically follow several common steps that include
application, fee payment, auditor visit, feedback, certification, and periodic re-visits. Recently,
a number of alternative accommodation standards have emerged to cater to various niches,
such as environmental standards and faith-based standards. It is worth noting that the
presence of standards does not necessarily result in the standardization of services, as many
standards simply evaluate physical attributes or characteristics.
The following figure shows a segmentation of selected conventional hospitality quality
standards categorized according to the geographic area they cover as well as the entity that
has set the standard. 16
15 The Joint WTO & IH&RA Study on Hotel Classification. Rep. World Tourism Organization and IH&RA, 16 Apr. 2004. Web. 4
Oct. 2016.
16 Online booking and rating sites (e.g., Priceline, TripAdvisor) may apply internal/global standards to generate a hotel’s
quality classification and also generate a quality rating based on user input