Religious tourism. A Meta-analysis and state-of-the-art (2019-2023)

Religious tourism is an important economic and cultural driver for many destinations and is one of the fastest-growing sectors within the global tourism market. Based on a meta-analysis and review of emerging literature from the period 2019-2023 in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) of the Web of Science (WoS), this study analyses, from a quantitative-qualitative approach, the state-of-the-art research on this sub-category of tourism from a corpus of 500 documents. The most relevant results show that the COVID-19 pandemic affected scientific production, with China, the United States, and Spain being the three countries that have published the most on the subject. Research on tourism to Christian and Islamic destinations appears most frequently. However, destinations linked to Hinduism tend to be over-represented with respect to numbers of people of this creed, which may be due to tourism specialising in meditation and wellness.