ABSTRACT
It has long been suggested that the contemporary tourist experience is akin to a sacred journey. More specifically, it is argued that, with declining adherence to traditional religious rituals and practice and the diminishing significance of religion as a social institution, tourism has come to represent a secular spiritual substitute for religion. Not only has tourism become a quest for an ‘elective’ spiritual centre elsewhere, for a meaningful life not experienced in the ‘exile’ of the home environment but more generally tourism is claimed to be ‘functionally and symbolically equivalent to other institutions that humans use to embellish and add meaning to their lives’. However, in establishing tourism as a contemporary counterpoint to traditional religious practices, as a spiritual experience, however, a number of questions emerge that to date have not been sufficiently considered. For instance, is the tourist experience inevitably spiritual? Or, do all tourists experience a sense of spirituality when participating in ‘spiritual tourism’? The purpose of this chapter is to address these and other questions. Following a brief review of the distinction between religion and spirituality and models that conceptualize this distinction in the tourism context, it then goes on to explore contemporary perspectives on the spiritual dimension of tourism. Finally, it draws a number of conclusions with regard to the extent to which tourists and/or their experiences may legitimately be referred to as spiritual.
