Management challenges for religion-based attractions

Abstract

Introduction Religion-based visitor attractions form an immensely diverse assemblage, varied in scale, location, visitor motivation and management style. Most are sites that are sacred to one or more religious traditions, including many places of worship or pilgrimage that have been receiving visitors for hundreds or thousands of years (McGettigan, 2003). But the category also includes crassly commercial theme parks with some religious motifs, as well as many sites which fall somewhere on the continuum between these two extremes. The writer has attempted elsewhere to classify sacred sites (Shackley, 2001) and to provide an overview of some site-specific management issues (Shackley, 2002, 2004). Conceptual frameworks for the study of religious tourism are often based around the work of Cohen (1979) and Smith (1992). This chapter, however, focuses especially on several operations management issues especially significant at religious sites whichhave become visitor attractions, and introduces the recent phenomena of commercially managed visitor attractions based on a religious theme. The subject is currently attracting a great deal of academic interest, including edited books by Fernandes et al. (2003) and Timothy and Olsen (2006), both of which focus on pilgrimage and spiritual journeys but include a consideration of the site management issues experienced at the end of such journeys (Olsen, 2006). This has also been applied to religious sites associated with relatively little known traditions, such as the case of Haifa’s Baha’I Gardens in Israel (Collins-Kreiner and Gatrell, 2006), which attracts both Baha’I pilgrims and secular visitors with different socio-spatial practices, concluding that differing motives define the activity space of visitors and contribute to a separation of tourist and pilgrim experiences which has been utilized by the municipality in the creation of a specific visitor attraction.