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Religious tourism is a form of travel that revolves around visiting religious sites, shrines, and houses of worship. It is a unique and distinctive type of tourism that carried out great importance for many people around the world, whether it is a p…
Religious tourism is a form of travel that revolves around visiting religious sites, shrines, and houses of worship. It is a unique and distinctive type of tourism that carried out great importance for many people around the world, whether it is a pilgrimage to Mecca or visiting the holy shrines of the Imams of Ahil al-Bayt (ealayhim alsalam) or the sacred places of various religions. This important arises because they allow individuals to connect with their faith, history and culture in a deep and meaningful way. Given the importance of religious tourism, especially from an economic standpoint and from the transfer of cultures between different parts of the world, it is necessary for tourist destinations to give attention to their marketing in order to attract visitors by drawing up effective marketing strategies for religious destinations and their landmarks for attracting tourists from all over the world. One of the most important aspects of marketing religious tourism is understanding the unique needs and preferences of religious travelers. Although religious travelers are often motivated by spiritual or religious reasons, their travel decisions are highly influenced by multiple factors such as security, political, the country's infrastructure, technology, and others.
Hence, this research deals with knowing the factors affecting the marketing of religious tourism in general, through conduct oral interviews with a selected sample of specialists in the field of tourism and marketing religious tourism in Iraq as a first stage and posed the basic question of the study, which is: What are the factors affecting the marketing of religious tourism in Iraq?, and through the answers to the research sample, the factors affecting the marketing of religious tourism in Iraq were identified. In the second step or quantitative stage, by using statistical method (TOPSIS), these factors were arranged based on their degree of importance.
This study reached to several conclusions, including that there is a great weakness in the marketing of religious tourism in Iraq by the official institutions responsible for tourism and almost complete reliance on the spiritual motivation and personal desire of tourists to visit the holy shrines, as well as the failure to provide additional tourism options for the religious tourist that suited his interests and culture by exploiting Historical, heritage and entertainment places in the holy cities. In addition to the fact that most workers in the field of providing tourism services do not possess skills based on academic tourism education.
This study also presented a set of recommendations, including the need to draw up effective marketing strategies for religious tourism through which religious tourism sites in Iraq and other supporting sites in the holy religious cities can be introduced to attract more tourists, as well as show interest in teaching classes within academic education about tourism and religious tourism in Iraq. Also, It is necessary to employ holders of academic tourism certificates to work in the field of providing tourism services, and also pay attention to developing heritage and archaeological sites to be a valuable tourist addition to the tourists staying in the holy cities. Additionally, the need to provide facilities for tourists from countries for whom it is difficult to obtain an entry visa to Iraq should be taken into consideration.
Establish political relations with those countries. In addition, religious tourism institutions must take advantage of digital marketing tools and platforms to reach religious travelers, especially as we know that tourists currently rely heavily on the Internet and social media to research and plan their trips, so religious tourism institutions must have a strong representation across the Internet and the use of digital marketing strategies such as social media marketing to attract religious tourists
