Between Sacred and Profane. A Systematic Literature Review on Religious Tourism in Marketing Research

Religious tourism appears an increasingly important phenomenon in the contemporary tourism industry, being able to move huge amounts of people. It is a particularly complex and peculiar kind of tourism, that entails different meanings and spheres of human psychology and culture. Due to the prominent role of cultural heritages and anthropological dynamics in its development, religious tourism has represented fertile ground for humanistic and anthropology-based research. However, data show that also the economic impact of this increasingly relevant phenomenon is strongly growing. Hence, tourism research has approached this phenomenon also from managerial and marketing perspectives, considering it as a particular kind of consumption phenomenon. The interest of tourism marketing and management is particularly recent, intensifying only in the last decade. The present work provides a general overview of the research knowledge that has been developed so far, regarding religious tourism in tourism research, particularly focusing on tourism marketing and management research. This objective has been carried out by applying Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in order an international literature perspective on the topic. Results are provided in order to delineate major avenues for future research.