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This chapter examines the role of heritage as a means of empowering destination communities and providing deeper and more meaningful encounters between tourists and their destination, which contributes to the notion of Destination Conscience by highlighting more sustainable and humane ways of ‘doing’ tourism and opening places up to greater community involvement and access by visitors. This includes heritage concepts such as Indigenous communities, local spirituality and religious traditions, public archaeology and ordinary heritage, and how these translate into deeper engagement between residents and tourists, community empowerment and a more creative and holistic tourist experiences. Conceptually, this chapter highlights notions of empowerment, tourists' experiences and Destination Conscience.

This chapter presents findings from in-depth interviews with female pilgrims traveling from Turkey on their Hajj. The three main motives for the respondents were fulfilling one of the Five Pillars of Islam, visiting the center of the Muslim world, and seeing how others practiced Islam. For the majority of female pilgrims, the decision to go was made either jointly with their husbands or by others on their behalf. The long-lasting influences of this pilgrimage may include becoming more spiritual, peaceful, attentive, calm, tolerant, and careful. The experiences reported by respondents are discussed.

Many governments and public organizations are turning to shared service arrangements to decrease costs while increasing service levels. This paper aims to elucidate the fine-grained challenges managers face as they adjust to working under a shared service arrangement.

A two-year longitudinal ethnographic field study followed the IT shared service transformation process at a large public university. Meeting observations, emails, documents and interviews were used in the qualitative analysis.

The research identifies 11 challenges faced by management undergoing a transition to shared services. The authors use a taxonomy of management challenges based on the organizational perspectives literature (Knol et al., 2014) to organize the challenges and relate them to prior literature.

The novel findings include the importance of changing organizational culture, balancing dual interests of cost and customer focus, establishing a sense of urgency and achieving process standardization through practicing when adopting a shared service arrangement. The results from a single case study may not by generalizable to other organizations.

This study provides a nuanced and fine-grained understanding of the managerial challenges of adopting IT-shared services. This unique longitudinal data set describes in nuanced detail the challenges faced by frontline managers.

A growing number of people are using tourism as an escape from the fiction of their daily lives. The purpose of this chapter is to explore a dimension of tourism where the outer search is the vehicle for an inner journey of spiritual development. The chapter introduces a novel concept, tourism of spiritual growth, which it perceives as a variety of spiritual tourism with an esoteric motivation. In this regard, the individual undertakes an intentional “voyage of discovery” for inner awareness and transformation. The term is conceptualized, and its central dimensions—meaning, transcendence, and connectedness—analyzed in relation to the motivations it involves.

India is the place of many religions, customs and traditions. Religious events are regularly an exceptional tourist opportunity, and there are several religious events that take place in India throughout the year. These events not only focus on the importance of people engaging in religious events and having spiritual experience but also act as a promotional opportunity for any country. With changing times, these religious places have become a site for tourism; relatively a mere pilgrimage and digital marketing is especially useful in promoting these events and places to new potential attendees as well. Therefore, this research stresses upon the small- and medium-sized religious events that take place in various regions of India and the importance of digital marketing in sustaining and promoting the event tourism.

For sustainable progress of heritage tourism in Muslim regions, exaggerated and distorted notions of Islam have to be dispelled. To accomplish such an arduous task, the first step is to examine media content employed by key tourism organizations/agencies in Muslim countries. This chapter examines the heritage environments and contemporary macro environment factors in Muslim countries that are either secular or Islamic in nature. Using cultural indicators, it further analyzes the content of website marketing employed by the leading tourism authorities in the selected regions to understand if considerations and efforts are made to market Muslim heritage. The findings indicate mixed results.

Beginning with a historical outline and the definition of tourism as a privileged opportunity for physical and spiritual renewal, the author deals with the question of how young people put themselves in touch with religion and spirituality. After 2012, Catholic pastoral has changed: not only devotional attention to the pilgrimages but also an overview of the resources constituted by sacred places as a tool for socioeconomic and cultural development of destinations. Religious tourism means an appropriate moment to let the body relax and to nourish the spirit: from this approach, the author shows examples of ‘religious light tourism’ in Europe founded on an ecumenical approach and on sustainability. The effects are positive: for the offer, new jobs (guides, resorts, enogastronomic and folkloristic services); for the demand, a new way to preserve the beauty of creation for future generations, by offering emotional and not massive travels: Caminos, trekking and slow paths, in order to know local traditions and nature. Therefore, ‘religious light tourism’ is a champion of sustainability and responsible tourism because religious tourism is, usually, less affected by season's trends, social and economic crisis (but not in the present COVID-19!).