Secular or sacred? The role of perceived association on Muslim tourists’ attitudes toward visiting other religion’s tourism sites

Purpose This study aims to examine the perceptions of religious tourism site associations, specifically Muslim tourists’ perception of other religions’ tourism site affiliations. Grounded in the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) framework, the study conceptualizes site religious affiliation as the stimulus, religiosity as part of the organism that processes this input and tourists’ attitudes toward visiting as the response. This study also tests whether perceived association influences attitudes toward visits and examines the moderating role of the Islamic attribute of destination in the model. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative design was applied using samples of 513 Muslim respondents. This study uses a six-point Likert scale on online questionnaires. Grounded in the S-O-R framework, the study conceptualizes perceived site religious affiliation as the stimulus, religiosity and internal beliefs as part of the organism and attitude toward visiting as the response. The data were then analyzed using the structural equation modeling technique. Findings This study found that Islamic religiosity significantly affects the perceived association in only non-Abrahamic affiliated tourism sites. However, the relationship is negative, i.e. the more religious Muslim tourists are, the more they will associate the place as secular rather than religious. Meanwhile, for the Abrahamic-Catholicism site, Islamic religiosity does not affect Muslim tourists’ perceived association toward the tourism site. Furthermore, the data reveal that the more Muslim visitors associate the destinations as sacred (stimulus), the more negative their attitude toward visiting them (response), processed through religious evaluation (organism). Finally, Islamic attributions of the sites weaken the negative impact of perceived sacredness on Muslim tourists’ visiting attitudes toward other religion’s tourism sites by altering internal evaluations within the organismic stage. Originality/value This study sheds light on how tourists from particular religious affiliations (i.e. Islam) perceive tourism sites affiliated with other religions. By adopting the S-O-R framework, this study illustrates the psychological process underlying tourists’ interpretation and reaction toward religious stimuli. The comparative view of the religions affiliated with the tourism sites that are the same and different from those of the tourists’ (Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic) adds to the value contributed by this study.