Islamic tourism : exploring perceptions & possibilities in Egypt

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities and underlying challenges for implementing Islamic tourism in Egypt. It also evaluates through qualitative techniques the awareness and acceptance of this new concept from the Egyptian consumer's point of view. Two focus groups and 12 in-depth interviews were used to serve the purpose of qualitative data collection. Narrative analysis of the qualitative data showed a general acceptance of Islamic Tourism as a concept, though spontaneous awareness is fairly low. Insights into the extent of which the conservative concept is to be implemented are of value to tourism industry managers. Due to the qualitative nature of the data, results are not generalisable or statistically objective. Given the attempts at an inductive theory where no previous research on Islamic Tourism has used descriptive models and hypotheses, the data nature limitation is justifiable. The small non-representative sample imposes a restraint given time constraints of the researchers. This paper uniquely concerns an under-developed area of academic study - i.e. examining the role of Muslim consumer awareness, attitude and acceptance of a new tourism option in the tourism concept's ultimate implementation.