Title: Developing strategic relationships for religious tourism businesses: a systematic literature review

Authors: Ali Heidari; Hamid Reza Yazdani; Fatemeh Saghafi; Mohammad Reza Jalilvand

Addresses: Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran ' Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyse the existing literature on the interrelationships of tourism businesses in the context of religious tourism. By taking a systematic approach to literature review, a total of 34 academic articles was content analysed. As a general framework, Watkins and Bell's classification was applied in order to increase the review consistency and validity. The results show that the inter-relationships of tourism businesses have gained increasing academic attention in the past decade in terms of the number of published articles. The various categories of inter-organisational relationships often used in relation to tourism business setting are explored. The timeline of business relationships research in tourism literature are presented along with a methodological approach to the literature. The most of existing articles claim to study the cooperative relationships of tourism businesses. The main methodological approach used in studying inter-organisational relationships of tourism businesses was empirical one.

Keywords: religious destination; strategic relationships; tourism business.

DOI: 10.1504/EMJM.2017.084273

EuroMed Journal of Management, 2017 Vol.2 No.1, pp.77 - 98

Received: 24 Nov 2016
Accepted: 08 Jan 2017
Published online: 23 May 2017 *

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