Aims

The aims of this chapter are to:

• illustrate the diversity of religion-based attractions

• identify major management trends and challenges

• distinguish religious from secular visitor attractions

• consider visitor motivations.

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 sometimes thousands) of years. 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 author has attempted elsewhere to classify sacred sites (Shackley, 2001) and to provide an overview of one specific category (Shackley, 2002). This chapter focuses especially on two operations management fields especially significant at religious sites that have become visitor attractions, namely, the management of visitor flows and the generation of revenue, and also introduces the recent phenomena of commercially managed visitor attractions based on a religious theme.

Classifying religion-based attractions

The range of religion-based attractions in the world is enormous and the problem of classifying them could be tackled in any number of ways (Vuconic, 1996). They could be divided, for example, by religious tradition, by the level of site utilization or by the balance between the worshipping community and the number of tourist visitors. They could be categorized by management type (sacred or secular, public or private sector, commercial or...