What role does touristś educational motivation play in promoting religious tourism among travellers?

ABSTRACT

Despite the prevalence of theories based on religious tourism, very little research has been done on educational motivation. Up until now, educational motivation has played a secondary role. Most religious tourism studies hardly mention educational motivation as a driver to visit sacred places. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analysing its relevance as a key motivation in religious tourism. A total of 242 visitors were interviewed in 2017. The mediator effect of educational motivation is measured and compared with other tourist motivations, such as religious, environmental and rural, and cultural with PLS-SEM. The research discussed here evaluates the direct or indirect effect of educational motivation on touristś learning experience while visiting a religious place, in this case, the Royal Monastery of Guadalupe. The model revealed a strong predictive power (R² = 87.5%) and reported an indirect effect between educational motivation, environmental and rural motivation and cultural motivation.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational motivation
• religious tourism
• learning experiences
• pilgrimage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rafael Robina Ramírez obtained Ph.D. in environmental ethics and sociology in 2002 and is Assistant Professor since 2012, from that time he has been teaching environmental ethics and management at Extremadura University (Spain). He is author of several books and articles. Nowadays the author is leading an Innovation Teaching Project in the Tourism Faculty in which 35 academics are involved from the University. He is currently researching about environmental ethics. The project’s main aim is to teach business ethics in a cross-sectional way, including empirical cases. The project started in 2013 and is renewed every year by our University.

Antonio Fernández Portillo holds Ph.D. in Financial Economics and Accounting and is Lecturer since 2012. He has published several papers in entrepreneurship and tourism. He is also collaborating with the regional government in Extremadura (Spain) organizing practical courses for young entrepreneurs to set up their own touristic companies.