Open AccessA CONCEPTUAL PAPER OF SPIRITUAL TOURISM MODEL (ISToM)
Author(s) -
Siti Salwa Md. Sawari,
Zaleha Mohamad,
Nor'ain Binti Haji Othman,
Amirul Eimer Ramdzan Ali
Publication year - 2021
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.46754/gtc.2021.11.057
Subject(s) - tourism , religious tourism , spirituality , context (archaeology) , tourism geography , pleasure , marketing , sustainability , quality (philosophy) , islam , business , sociology , environmental ethics , psychology , political science , geography , law , medicine , ecology , philosophy , alternative medicine , archaeology , pathology , epistemology , neuroscience , biology
Spiritual tourism also known as one type of special interest tourism activity based on the expectations related with spirituality is now continuously developing and is being demanded by tourists. This demand is in line with the improvement of tourist information technology. Spiritual tourism will continuously develop due to the changes in the needs of the market. Initially, spiritual activities are directly connected with religion, and they have now shifted to the idea to something that is related with spiritual activities which include, creating comfort, pleasure and quality experience. Despite of the rapid development, it can be seen in the academic writing research, in which, there are still several researchers who argued religious and spiritual tourism as the same type of tourism. The phenomenon of religious spiritual tourism is more complex in the modern era and has been recognised as a separate tourism. Internationalising religious spiritual tourism in the context of people, places, and events has become a challenge. Religious spiritual tourism requires a new mode as a form of quality tourism development so that it will organise sociocultural life with varieties of unique customs and become a tool to increase regional income, creating job opportunities and indirectly improve Malaysians’ quality of life. Thus, there is an urge to integrate the religious aspect into spiritual tourism. Hence, this research aims to develop an Islamic Spiritual Tourism Model (ISToM) based on Maqasid As Shariah. It is hoped that the findings will contribute to the existing knowledge about values and provide implications for developing spiritual tourism sustainably.