Hospitality Management 19 (2000) 311±326 The tourist behind the pilgrim in the Holy Land Aliza Fleischer Department of Agricultural Economics and Management, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, P.O. Box 12, Rehovot, 76100, Israel Abstract Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land have evolved over the years into tourists. The behavior of the pilgrims as tourists has never been researched and in light of the large in¯ux of pilgrims expected in the new Millennium to Mediterranean countries, it should be addressed. This paper compares the characteristics, behavior and expenditure patterns of tourists to Israel de®ning themselves as pilgrims to other tourists. The formers were found to dier in many aspects from other tourists. Moreover, within the pilgrims group Catholics and Protestants were found to dier in their patterns of behavior as tourists. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Holy Land; Pilgrims vs. tourists; Protestants vs. Catholic pilgrims 1. Introduction The phenomenon of pilgrimage had existed many hundreds of years before the phenomenon of tourism appeared in human behavior. The source of the term pilgrim is the Latin word for stranger and it was coined in the late 1100 s. The source for the term tourist comes from the Latin word for a person who makes a circuitous journey and it was coined some 800 years later. The dierences and similarities between tourists and pilgrims have been discussed at length in several papers. Most of the literature analyzing tourist pilgrimage as tourism activity has looked at it from either an anthropological or economic perspective. The anthropological approach analyzes the pilgrimage±tourism relationship from the individual point of view and the way society perceives him. Many researches taking this approach try to establish criteria to dierentiate between pilgrims and tourists. Almost all of them conclude that in some cases demarcation lines between tourists and pilgrims do not E-mail address: ¯eische@agri.huji.ac.il (A. Fleischer). 0278-4319/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0278-4319(00)00026-8