Commodification of Spiritual Experience in Tourism

Commodification in spiritual tourism has ambivalent effects: it can widen access and support experiences of awe, mindfulness, meaning-making, and spiritual well-being, but also foster performative spirituality, expectation inflation, fragile authenticity, decontextualization, symbolic extraction, unequal value capture, and the displacement of community authority. The review proposes a continuum model of commodification—infrastructural, experiential, and extractive—and argues that the key issue is whether market mediation remains subordinate to ritual integrity, psychological safeguarding, community custodianship, and equitable benefit-sharing.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This critical review explores how the process of commodification is affecting the spiritual dimension of tourism at both psychological and social levels. Utilizing studies of tourism, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and religion, the review moves beyond treating the commodification of the sacred in tourism in a purely negative light as corruption of the sacred by market. Rather, market mediation reorganizes how spiritual experience is accessed, interpreted, staged, and governed. The review shows an ambivalent pattern. On the one hand, commercialization can widen access, provide interpretive scaffolding, and support experiences of awe, mindfulness, meaning-making, spiritual well-being, and perceived transformation. On the other hand, it can foster performative spirituality, expectation inflation, fragile authenticity, decontextualization, symbolic extraction, unequal value capture, and the displacement of community authority by tourism and platform logics. To synthesize these tensions, the article proposes a continuum model of commodification consisting of infrastructural, experiential, and extractive forms. It concludes that the key issue is not whether markets enter spiritual tourism but whether market mediation remains subordinate to ritual integrity, psychological safeguarding, community custodianship, and equitable benefit-sharing.