درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In todays’ world of climate change and increasing pollution, the concept of green travel and tourism has been proposed as a possible mitigating solution. However, the pace with which tourists embrace this new concept is slow. It can be argued that the reluctance to embrace is linked to the inability to understand the spiritual side of green travel and tourism. It is said that humankind have the tendency separate itself from nature. Nature is considered as ‘others’ and does not merit the same level of respect. Nature is there for humankind’s use and consumption, a thinking that easily leads to abuse and destruction. The same can be applied to tourism. While international travel includes a substantial number of tourists who would consider themselves to be religious and spiritual, it is argued that not many of them will be able to decipher the spiritual aspect of opting for green travel and tourism compared to mass tourism. This paper attempts to demonstrate the close link between green travel and tourism with spirituality. It tends to explain why more people who believe in religion and spirituality should strongly consider the concept in their travel decisions. The hope is to increase public awareness on the spirituality of green travel and tourism so the concept will soon become the order of the day.  

Spirituality is a universal and human phenomenon which is not restricted to any religions or religious groups. In fact, spiritual experiences are thought of as special human experiences which give meaning to life. Such enlightening experiences make man connect to a higher being. Therefore, spiritual tourism is a journey on which a traveller achieves a perception of spiritual experiences. Such experiences can be gained on a long walk with a group of sympathetic fellow travelers towards religious destinations. They may also be achieved while watching a pristine view of the nature which enables the viewer to understand the creator of the scene and reach deep meanings through a creative insight. Creative tourism is mostly manifested as a form of inner expression and discovery, a tool of improvement in identity and distinction or a search for the expansion of capabilities and experiences as well as an ability to reflect the life purposefully. This type of tourism belongs to self-actualizing individuals. In fact, they are educated people who seek to give meaning to life. Therefore, the creative tourism theory is the closest approach to tourism combined with spirituality. These two categories overlap with each other significantly. In this qualitative study, the two-stage Delphi technique and desk research method were used to verify this hypothesis. Creative tourism can be thought of as a new paradigm of tourism or the third generation after coastal tourism and cultural tourism. It can also be considered an evolved type of cultural tourism which pays more attention to the intangible heritage rather than the tangible one. In either case, it is a form of network tourism in which values are created collectively through available relationships and the flow of social relationships and capital in networks. Therefore, its new management models and strategies should be identified and applied. In the current study, the desk research method was used to identify such models. Then the two-stage Delphi technique was employed to verify them.

A connection has long existed between tourism and spirituality. More specifically, travel for spiritual purposes has for centuries been a popular manifestation of human mobility. Pilgrimage and other spiritually-motivated travel is widely considered to be one of the earliest forms of tourism and nowadays, religious tourism, in all its forms, has evolved into a major sector of the global tourism market. Over the last three decades, however, an alternative perspective on the tourism-spirituality relationship has emerged. Focusing on the meaning or significance of contemporary tourism, it is argued that tourism is a sacred journey, a secular spiritual experience; in other words, tourism has become a secular alternative to the institution of religion, the contemporary tourist a modern, secular pilgrim. Hence, a conceptual divide exists in the relationship between tourism and spirituality, between spiritual (religious) tourism and tourism as spirituality (religion).  Moreover, that divide is evidenced in much of the extant research into tourism, religion and spirituality.                 As this paper suggests, however, such a conceptual divide over-simplifies the relationship between tourism and spirituality; not only is the distinction between spiritual / religious tourism and tourism as a secular spiritual experience becoming increasing fuzzy – some traditional religious travel experiences, for example, are taking on the aura of commoditised tourism products, with implications for the experience of participants themselves – but also the relationship can be viewed from different disciplinary and theoretical positions. A humanistic perspective, for example, questions the notion of spirituality itself, whilst varying interpretations of religion / spirituality also cast the relationship in different lights. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity of the spiritual dimension of tourism. Reviewing the extant literature, it highlights the dimensions of and limits to research into the relationship between tourism and spirituality and, exploring the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, challenges contemporary understandings and points to areas demanding further research.  

Place is major element of tourism activity, and therefore most tourism programs are based on that criterion. One of the main goals of tourism planning and management is assisting tourists in order to achieve deep understanding of a destination. In this regard, the way in which Place is being studied and interpreted plays a crucial role in realizing the goal of tourism. Landscape Science, as an objective-subjective phenomenon, introduces new ways to interpret place and landscape based on which tourists receive information about place and also enter a Holistic World described by landscape literature. This paper reviews education and training methods and investigates tourism as a knowledge system that is able to discover the latent meaning of the place. Adopting the landscape tourism approach is therefore a prerequisite for the perception of the meaning of places.