Service Quality and Religious Tourism

Hajj is a unique annual universal Islamic event, that can only happen once a year in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, where about three million Muslim gathers annually, and the numbers are continuously increasing. Along with the increase in the numbers of pilgrims, the need for quality services during Hajj will keep on increasing. Improving and upgrading the quality of services and making the event safe and pleasant for the pilgrims are of prime importance to the Hajj organisers. Efforts to understand and identify service quality have been undertaken in the last three decades by many quality management thinkers and leaders. This book aims to understand service quality and religious tourism from an Islamic Pilgrimage (Hajj) viewpoint through measuring the quality of the services provided to pilgrims by different institutions in Saudi Arabia. The book builds a bridge of understanding that links pilgrims’ expectations of the quality of the services that will be provided to them during the Hajj, with their satisfaction with the actual level of the quality of services. In addition, the book determines and examines the size and direction of Hajj service quality gap(s).