JO Magazine

What's behind the boom in global religious tourism, and how can Jordan learn to benefit from it?

Words by Nicholas Seeley.

EVEN IN THE EARLY days of summer, the baptism site at Bethany beyond the Jordan sizzles. A group of American tourists, idly chatting, follows a laconic tour guide down narrow, heat-soaked paths towards the brownish trickle of the river.

In the distance, a loud explosion echoes over the forested valley and the dry, scrubby wasteland that surrounds it. A cloud of black smoke billows on the horizon, appearing only meters away from the golden dome of the Greek Orthodox church of St. John the Baptist. The tourists are shocked; the guide tries to calm them, explaining, without apparent irony, that a sheep has stepped on a land mine. The tourists chuckle, not sure whether to believe this-if it's so, then someone is being very careless with their sheep. The explosions have been going on all day.

Possibly it was some artifact of the military zone that still surrounds the site, lying as it does on the border with Israel. Or, taking place on May 5, perhaps it was part of the preparations for the upcoming address by Pope Benedict XVI. Bethany, the site of two papal visits in a decade, is the centerpiece of Jordan's effort to court religious-primarily Christian-tourism as an economic driver for the Kingdom.

One year ago, the baptism site felt like a place that few except the truly penitent pilgrims would want to visit. The tour was long and hot, and the only shade came in the form of concrete baptismal pools surrounded by fake plastic rocks. The tourist souk near the ticketing office was forlornly half-empty; the visitors' center and restaurants were unfinished shells. Near the main entrance some kind of village was being built; its one monument was a giant gate that looked like a papier-mâché version of the Petra Treasury.

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Since then, Bethany has come a long way. The tour is shorter and more focused; the guides are better. The tourist souk isn't quite filled, but it's closer. The visitors' center and outdoor museum have been in progress almost since the site was opened, in the mid-1990s, but they're now expected to be completed within two years. The gaudy development near the entrance has disappeared. And during Pope Benedict XVI's recent pilgrimage, tourism authorities were working overtime to promote the site.

At a press conference with representatives of the Holy See, Tourism Minister HE Maha Khatib was straightforward about her ministry's objective: to "capitalize on His Holiness' presence in Jordan."

"We hope that most of you have the chance to tour around Jordan," she told the assembled international press corps. The government-supported Jordan Tourism Board had offered them all free trips to Jordan's big attractions.

"We hope that your coverage ... will be fair to Jordan, as it has always been," Khatib added. "Jordan has been witnessing a great growth in its tourism sector, and we are getting much more ambitious. ... We believe that Jordan can stand as a very important destination for people from all over the world, especially Catholics. ... We think that this is a major part of our touristic attraction, and we will definitely do our best to enhance it with all the appropriate infrastructure."

But Jordan has work to do if it hopes for a bigger slice of the faith tourism business. Globally, religious tourism accounts for perhaps 2 percent of the tourism market, experts say. But in terms of its own inbound tourism, only one-fifth of 1 percent of tourists to Jordan say they come for religious or pilgrimage reasons, according to the last major arrivals and departures survey, conducted in 2006-2007.

And while all of Jordan's tourist destinations have seen large increases in visitor numbers over the recent boom years, religious sites like Mt. Nebo and Bethany haven't grown faster or more steadily than others. (The largest growth was in Madaba, followed by Wadi Rum and Petra). So what will it take to really put Jordan on the map?

GLOBALLY, TOURISM HAS BEEN going through a period of intense growth in recent years. In 2008, there were 924 million tourist arrivals around the world-up from only 692 million in 2003, according to the UN World Tourism Association's latest barometer. Until the third quarter of 2008, when the entire world economy dropped into negative numbers, global tourism was growing at close to 7 percent a year. Some regions were even stronger: tourism in the Middle East grew 15.3 percent from mid-2007 to mid-2008. Even with the financial crisis, UN-WTO predicts tourism in the region is likely to grow about 11 percent from 2008-2009.

In Jordan, tourism took off in 2004, after a severe slump coinciding with the US invasion of Iraq, said Sa'ed Zawaideh, the educational, medical and religious tourism manager for the Jordan Tourism Board.

The latest Central Bank figures suggest that in 2008 tourism accounted for 14.4 percent of the country's GDP, he added-a landmark year.

Faith tourism seems to have done particularly well in this rising tide. The "rise of pilgrimage" has been discussed in the pages of The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, TIME and more-as well as numerous industry-specific publications that can now reach a mass audience via the Internet. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey wrote that the growth of pilgrimage routes like the Camino de Santiago, in Spain, spoke to "the growth of a new spirituality."

But understanding why this sector is growing remains difficult. Much of what has been written about faith tourism is based on anecdotes about individual sites, like the Camino.

"This is a big weakness of the religious tourism marketplace," said Kevin J. Wright, president of the World Religious Travel Association. He believes part of the problem is that too few governments and national organizations are tracking faith tourism's growth-something his association is now lobbying for. "In addition to us coming out with industry studies in the near future, we're hoping to really push [national] organizations and tourist boards to track religious travelers more closely," he said.

The Jordan Tourism Board is currently working on another arrivals and departures survey, which will provide some information about how tourists' motivations and plans have changed since 2006.

The United States is one country that does track religious tourism in its regular outbound passengers survey: for the past decade it has hovered at between 2 and 3 percent of all outbound tourism. But recently, the religious niche has experienced much more growth than the market in general. Between 2002 and 2007, general tourism grew by 33 percent, but religious tourism swelled by a startling 85 percent-a jump from 500,000 travelers to 900,000.

Public interest is also growing. Nearly a quarter of all Americans said they were interested in taking a "spiritual" trip or vacation, according to a survey done in 2006 by the US Tourism Association, a general-interest travel industry group. And a 2008 phone survey of about 20,000 households, conducted for the travel company Group Voyagers Inc., which markets a group of major travel brands including Globus, predicted a huge increase in the number of Americans actually going on faith-based trips.

And while most leisure-based tourism businesses have lost 20-40 percent of their volume because of the global financial crisis, Mike Schields, a director at Group Voyagers, said the group's religious travel business was down only about 3 percent, suggesting the industry might also be more resilient than other parts of the tourism trade-possibly because faith tourists have multiple motivations for making their trips.

Wright's association recently estimated that the trade is worth $18 billion a year, roughly 2 percent of the more than $730 billion tourist industry. As tourism has gone through its boom, religious tourism has remained a small portion of the total-but it seems to have grown enough to make the jump from a tiny niche to a substantial and recognized market.