Managing the Sacred: a Governance Perspective for Religious Tourism Destinations

Over the last few decades, policy makers have developed and formalised the religious tourism sector, to attract travellers to sacred sites and turn those sites into tourism destinations. Previously, travellers visited sacred places and sites out of a desire to come closer to spirituality and seek forgiveness for sins and wrongdoing. That concept has changed and religious tourism has become a commercialised entity that allows travel agencies and policy makers to benefit from religious travellers. The leading authors in religious tourism accept that it plays a significant role in the development of tourism destinations (Timothy and Olsen, 2006; Raj and Griffin, 2015; Trono, 2015). The notion of travel as simply being for business or recreation has been transformed by the individual traveller, who has been a contributing factor in the dynamic growth of tourism as a business model. It is now widely accepted that, given the complexity of players and resources involved in the delivery of the religious tourist experience, more sophisticated skills and models are needed to manage sacred sites, cities and destinations. In particular, literature in tourism management identifies a shift towards the concept of governance, considered a useful approach that facilitates an integrated decision making environment and an emerging opportunity for local development (Laws et al., 2011). This chapter will critically evaluate and discuss a conceptual framework, exploring the issues and themes related to the so-called ‘destination governance’ concept. The aim is to demonstrate the validity of applying these methodological insights to religious tourism destinations, and in doing so, building a possible system of classification related to the diverse management and governance models. A geographical perspective is chosen as a research strategy which emphasizes the recognition of the relationships among spatial patterns, processes and players that enable a place to be interpreted as a destination.