Religious tourism

Abstract

The experience of religious tourists is one of the most understudied aspects of the religious tourism market. This is, in part, because of several difficulties in studying experience overall. The purpose of this chapter is to work through some of these difficulties by focusing on how academics have attempted to describe and typologize the experiences of religious tourists. After deconstructing the intersection of religion and tourism through the term ‘religious tourism’, a brief review of the literature on religious tourist motivations and experiences is presented with an accompanying model of religious tourism experience. The differences between religious and tourist experiences are then discussed before concluding with a less than definitive answer to the question posed in the title of this chapter.