Managing religious and spiritual tourism sites

Abstract

Religious and spiritual tourism is now a powerful social, cultural, and economic force in the contemporary world, with over 300 million people a year engaging in “national and international religious journeys” to visit religious sites around the world. This chapter explores the huge variation of religious sites around the world—human as well as natural—alongside the wide range of management strategies used to sustain and operate them. The “core business” of religious heritage site management is to maintain a “sense of place”, or to provide an atmosphere that encourages visitors to have enhanced religious or spiritual experiences. While much of the literature on sacred site management comes from the Anglophone tourism literature and is written through Western, Christian, and post-Christian lenses, increasing attention needs to be paid to management practices conducted by other cultural and ethnic populations around the world.