Abstract
Purpose Spiritual tourism is becoming a significant growth area of the Indian travel market, with more Indians opting to go on pilgrimage to popular religious cities. There are many spiritual destinations where some of this life's essences can be sought to enjoy harmony and peace. The study aims to prioritize motivators driving the intentions of the tourists to visit the spiritual destination. Design/methodology/approach The current study applied the analytical hierarchical process, a multi-criteria decision-making technique, on the sample of visitors from all the six spiritual destinations to rank the motivational factors that drive the intentions of the tourist to visit a spiritual destination. Findings The study's results postulated that spiritual fulfillment motives and destination atmosphere are the top prioritized motivations, while destination attributes and secular motives emerged as the least prioritized. Practical implications The research study provides valuable insights to the spiritual tourism industry stakeholders to target the tourists' highly prioritized motivations to augment the visits to a particular spiritual destination. Originality/value Previous research has explored the motivations and modeled their relationships with tourists' satisfaction and intentions. But, the present study has applied a multi-criteria decision-making technique to add value to the existing knowledge base.
Highlights
Spiritual tourism attracts growing academic interest and is often seen as an extension of religious tourism (Kujawa, 2017)
The local weights (LW) specify the significance of sub-criteria within one specific category, while global weights (GW) specifies the significance of sub-criteria among all the sub-criteria in the total
Customs, traditions (SEF4) destination attributes (DEA) 1
Summary
Spiritual tourism attracts growing academic interest and is often seen as an extension of religious tourism (Kujawa, 2017). Religious tourism is a distinct kind of tourism (Medhekar and Haq, 2012) related to an individual’s religious faith (Ali et al, 2019) People make these sacred journeys to diverse holy places with the motives of searching for truth, enlightenment or authentic experiences related to such places (Bozic et al, 2016). It has been found that the journey to religious places is guided by other motives such as appreciating nature, educational or cultural fulfilment, relaxation, self-care and spending time with nature (Terzidou et al, 2018). These nonreligious motives opened up a new strand within religious tourism termed as spiritual tourism (Cheer et al, 2017). Spiritual tourism is a quest to find the answer to all the problems in life one is facing (Norman, 2011). Haq and Wong (2010) posited that amidst of overwhelming response to spiritual tourism, spirituality could be seen as the fifth “S,” an extension (Information about the authors can be found at the end of this article.)
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