Abstract
Religious tourism is one of the important sectors in the tourism industry because of its ability to contribute towards job creation, poverty alleviation, building cultural wealth, heightening religious faiths and boosting the economy of the country amongst other benefits. However, the emergence of COVID-19 devastated the religious tourism sector making the above-mentioned benefits difficult to achieve especially during the early stages of lockdown in South Africa. Even though technology was being adopted in the business and sport tourism sector as one of the strategies to recover from the setbacks that were caused by the pandemic, it was challenging for the religious tourism sector to make use of technology because the sector is highly dependent on the congregation’s presence at a particular place to fulfil their faith’s commitment. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the impacts of COVID-19 on religious tourism and explore the strategies that were implemented for the sector to recover and bounce back in South Africa. Following the adoption of a purely qualitative approach, this study conducted semi-structured interviews (n=50) in the greater Johannesburg region and surrounding areas with the stakeholders in the religious tourism sector. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were utilised to select the relevant key stakeholders that have knowledge and experience on this study’s research phenomenon. The Atlas.Ti software was adopted to analysis the collected data. The current study’s findings reveal that the religious tourism sector incurred financial burden from the COVID-19 pandemic as their practices and services were put on standstill. The study further found that when the restrictions were lifted, people feared going back to church and being in crowded places thus they resorted to worshipping from the comfort of their homes as well as hosting sacred events with their close friends and family members. Additionally, the findings reveal that the key strategies that were put in place to recover the sector were the adaptation of technology, resumption of projects and religious activities as well as providing psychological support to the congregation and local communities. Furthermore, the present study highlights the importance and potential of religious tourism as a niche area for the recovery of the overall tourism sector in the face of COVID-19 and other external shocks in South Africa.