درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This article examines how contemporary tourists visiting the mystical destinations perceive the different aspects of the mystical tours. In other words, this article attempts to investigate the role of mystical journeys and spiritual tours in improvement of tourists’ satisfaction and quality of life. The statistical population of this study includes the international tourists, who participated in the mystical tours and visited the attractions of the mystical elders in Iran. Therefore, 384 tourists were selected by convenience sampling method and a questionnaire survey was conducted since June 2019 to January 2020. Then, in order to determine relationships between research variables, the Structural Equation Modeling method was applied. Findings indicated that participating in the mystical tours has an impact on the increasing quality of life. This effect can be achieved through various variables. In addition, many factors and variables such as brand image, quality of services, perceived value, tourist satisfaction, reputation of destinations and tourist commitment to the destination have positive impacts on the tourists’ loyalty.

By producing the paradigm of creative tourism, the knowledge increasing discipline of tourism invites tourists to visit and interact with the unique and live culture of societies instead of just sightseeing in museums and ancient monuments. In this paradigm, tourists engage all of their senses in the creation of their unique experience and improving their relations with local people from seller/buyer to a master/apprentice level. Not only the cultural capital but also the social capital would be increased from this interaction. The main goal of this research is to show that, contrary to what appears at first, the creative domain of gastronomy is a spiritual one and flourishing local communities and creative tourism based on this paradigm can evolve the wellbeing and material life of inhabitants and tourists as well. Moreover, this includes significant spiritual endowments both for guests and hosts in the creative gastronomic destinations. Creative tourism based on gastronomy regards new looks to local communities as the first step in creating unique and added value experiences including economic, human, and social values. In creative tourism, locals and tourists will open their eyes on the destination in completely new ways, so that they could see better in creating new and valuable experiences. This definition is closely related to the Quranic command of “The man must consider what he eats”. In this research, using thematic analysis and Delphi method, it is shown that the components of spiritual perception have significant overlaps with the components of gastronomic creative tourism. Factors such as “comfort and satisfaction”, “Giving meaning to life”, “interaction with others”, “friendship with nature and environment”, and “surrender and thanksgiving “, as the components of the spiritual understanding, showed common and undeniable spaces with the components of creative tourism. These components include “authentic experiences “, “active participation “, “learning”, “self-esteem and self-awareness”, “new products and processes”, and “new spaces”. Based on our results, each of these components has their own proprietary domains and non-negligible common spaces, and even in some cases are subsets of each other.