Understanding the Travellers’ Mosque Experiences: The Case of Istanbul

Abstract

Visiting holy places is one of the important parts of faith tourism. Travellers visit religious sites not only for worship but also for secular pleasures. This study analysed online reviews to understand how travellers rate holy sites and what experiences they gained after their visit. In this sense, the mosque, which is the place of worship in Islam, was chosen as the holy place, and Tripadvisor, one of the most popular online travel-sharing platforms was used as the sharing platform. As a sample, travellers who visited Suleymaniye mosque in Istanbul, one of Turkey’s most important tourist destinations, were considered suitable. In this regard, online comments (n=524) for Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul between 2019 and 2021 were collected, and the data were analysed using the MAXQDA program. Most of the comments were made in 2019 (69.47%) and a significant portion of the travellers who commented on the mosque were from Europe (38.54%). Through content analysis, five main components / themes were identified: ‘sense of awe’, ‘architectural factors’, ‘spiritual and religious factors’, ‘environmental factors’, and ‘historical factors’. The research confirms previous findings that travellers visiting sacred sites tend to focus on architecture, history, and significant figures. The experiences of travellers visiting Suleymaniye Mosque in the future can be examined empirically and compared with the results of this research. © 2023 Dublin Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.