The foundations of this book stem from our professional interest in tourism and our own spiritual backgrounds and religious belief systems, which guide our everyday lives. After having travelled for religious purposes ourselves on many occasions, we have realized the important position that spiritually and religiously motivated travel holds within the realm of global tourism. Millions of people travel each year for various reasons that essentially boil down to spiritual foundations, whether or not they adhere to an ‘official’religion. In addition to volume, this form of travel is geographically widespread with most regions of the world being home to sacred spaces that appeal to religious adherents or other people who visit sacredscapes out of sheer curiosity.

Despite the pervasiveness and volume of religious tourism throughout the world, relatively little has been said about it in the religion or tourism literatures. A nascent collection of journal articles has appeared during the past 15 years, most in two special issues on the subject in Annals of Tourism Research (1992) and Tourism Recreation Research (2001), and a few books have been published since 2000 that outline the history of pilgrimage and the transformation of pious journeys into modern-day tourism. Given this dearth of information compared to other forms of tourism and the fact that scholars, religious leaders and pilgrimage destination officials continue to debate the nature of tourism, religion, pilgrimage and religious tourism, the idea for this book developed.