Sustainable Religious Tourism and Visitor Experience: Evidence from Ujjain, India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70917/ijcisim-2026-5190Keywords:
Sustainable religious tourism, visitor experience, service quality, SERVQUAL, visitor satisfaction, Ujjain, revisit intentionAbstract
In religious tourism, the issue of visitors' experience has emerged as a pivotal one, as large numbers of pilgrims put strains on a tourist destination's capacity to provide a fulfilling and meaningful experience. With a sacred annual pilgrimage of Mahakal Lok corridor in 2022, the footfall of the temple of Ujjain, home to the Mahakaleshwar Jyotirlinga, has rallied to over 7 crore visitors annually.This study explores the experience of visitors to Ujjain, a premier Indian pilgrimage site, and the Mahakaleshwar Jyotirlinga temple, where footfall has increased significantly since the year 2022 of the Mahakal Lok corridor. Based on an adapted SERVQUAL model, the experience-economy paradigm and a spiritual-experience construct, the research assesses visitors' expectations, perceptions, satisfaction and behavioural intentions by interviewing a sample of 480 visitors. The spiritual and assurance dimensions are delivered well; the gap in the other dimensions – crowd management (−1.81), environmental cleanliness (−1.51) and responsiveness (−1.09) – are the widest gaps. The queue/waiting time, cleanliness and crowd management are in the priority quadrant in the Importance–Performance Analysis. The results of the structural analysis indicate that both service quality and spiritual experience contribute to satisfaction (R² = 0.58), which, in turn, has a strong relationship with revisit intention (β = 0.61) and recommendation intention (β = 0.58). The benchmarking of Ujjain with Varanasi, Tirupati and Shirdi shows that this city's spiritual appeal is excellent while performance of operational and environmental services are lagging behind peers of trust-governed cities. The paper proposes crowding and environmental services as key attributes of religious tourism experiences that need to be managed to meet the necessary conditions for sustainable religious tourism in sacred cities and provides justified priorities for the preparations for Simhastha 2028.
