Dimensions of spirituality in tourism: Developing the spiritual tourism experience scale (STES)

Abstract

Spirituality focuses on understanding the purpose of human creation and the ways to make life meaningful. The inner quest combined with travels and experiences motivated by both internal and external factors forms the core of spiritual tourism, setting it apart from religious tourism. The research primarily aims to develop, test, and validate a scale for measuring the spiritual tourism experience. The study utilizes a hypercritical scale development procedure based on the mixed research method. The data collection and processing procedure included 11 face-to-face and 42 asynchronous online interviews, 30 participant observations, a thematic analysis of 2683 tourist statements from 818 reviews, 950 questionnaires conducted on spiritual tourists, and further confirmatory factor analysis performed on PLS. The spiritual tourism experience is ultimately structured into six dimensions: "Transformation, Healing, Atmosphere, Transcendence, Escape, Divine Connectedness." The findings confirm that the 31-item "Spiritual Tourism Experience Scale (STES)" is both statistically valid and reliable. Based on the research findings, the paper presents the most comprehensive definition of spiritual tourism. The findings contradict the view that spiritual tourism is merely a subset of religious tourism. The psychometric properties of STES along with its practical and theoretical implications are discussed within the tourism industry and destination marketing framework.