This paper makes three important contributions to the current
literature on tourism, religion and heritage. First, this study examines
the relationships between a religious destination, and nonreligious
and religious tourists from a social distance perspective.
The findings of this study empirically support the notion that
different degrees of social distance help explain why people of
different faiths visit the sacred sites of others. Second, this study
identified four motivational domains (spiritual, recreational,
learning, and social) of tourists visiting a Buddhist site and the
motivations vary with their faith. People who visit a site related to
their own faith are motivated primarily by spiritual and other
concentric reasons, whereas the people from other faiths visit the
same site for more secular and excentric reasons, including recreational
sightseeing. Finally, contrary to much of the tourism and
pilgrimage literature, the terms ‘tourists’ and ‘pilgrims’ cannot be
easily separated based on faith, as the majority of Buddhists visiting
one of their most sacred sites identified themselves either as
tourists or both tourists and pilgrims. The study contributes to the
tourist-pilgrim debate by adding a cultural/societal dimension on
how the terms are defined. It also provides evidence that is useful
for managers of sacred sites, policy makers and other service providers
everywhere as they work to mitigate social distance-induced
conflict and provide access to visitors of other faiths.
The findings of this study are based on a sample of tourists
visiting a Buddhist site, and only three major religionsdBuddhism,
Hinduism and Christianitydwere included in the analysis. As well,
while the sample size is large enough to undertake statistical
analysis, a bigger sample size might be conducive to examining the
experiences and interactions of tourists of different faiths during
their visits to the sacred sites of others. We clustered the respondents
who chose “other” and did not identify themselves pilgrims
or tourists into a single group “none” (neither tourist nor
pilgrim). While doing so, we are not assuming that the “none”
group is homogenous. Thus, the findings of this study should be