Tourism and religion: Spiritual journeys and their consequences

Religion and tourism are inextricably linked. There are also many implications for the sites themselves and those who visit and are visited. We provide a comprehensive assessment of the primary issues and concepts related to tourism-religion intersections and discuss them from theoretical and applied perspectives. Empirical cases are from Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Baha’ism. Scholarly research has barely touched upon these relationships, although interest is growing. We delineate the category of religious tourists and other types of religiously-motivated tourists, identify holy sites and draw attention to numerous contemporary issues requiring additional research. And we address both sides of the religion-tourism connection: supply, stemming from the large number of major tourist destinations, places, and events; and demand, fuelled by visitors, who embody the intersection of spirituality, religiosity, and tourism. Thus far the conceptualization of the connection between religion and mobility is weak, especially within the new mobility paradigm, which is a reflection of the relative neglect of the relationships between tourism and religion. The connection between religion and tourism transcends geographical and sociological emphases and involves an interpretative approach seeking alternative and multiple meanings. Mobilities are products of the norms and values of disparate social traditions and order and also create and modify culture and its expressions.