Of wings & prayers: Canada's faith-based travel market

Considering Canada’s reputation as a multiculturally inclusive society of enthusiastic travellers, it's only fitting that its travel industry would have a robust - and growing - faith-based market.

According to the 2011 National Household Survey, while 24 per cent of Canadians claim no religious affiliation, 67 per cent identify as Christian, and mostly Catholic (Islam is the country’s second-largest religion at 3.2 per cent). In addition, Destination Canada found that 33.5 million international trips were taken by Canadians in 2014.

Stephanie Bishop, managing director of Globus family of brands, told PAX that the faith-based travel segment in Canada continues to grow with each passing year.

The company recently released its Religious Travel 2016 brochure, featuring packages from Globus and Cosmos, the latter of which has introduced two new programs, one to Israel & Jordan (Protestant Classic Israel) and another to Mexico (Mexico & Our Lady of Guadelupe). According to Bishop, the growth of the program (mostly in terms of destinations over itineraries, she explained) is due largely in part to travellers themselves, who are surveyed by Globus regarding their faith travel experiences with the company.

“When we started in the faith travel market, we only had Globus,” Bishop said. “We sit down and we listen, then we enhance the product. It’s a journey every year to modify the program. Overall, it’s a growing market.”

While there are some solo travellers, most tours are welcoming groups of either church congregations or friends sharing a particular faith, which has allowed some agents to become the go-to contact for churches when they book a trip for the congregation, with most travellers booking Globus coming from Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, Bishop said.

“What we find is its fantastic for groups,” she continued. “They’re all there to share in a spiritual experience.”

For agents interested in selling faith travel, it’s a matter of often just reaching out to the spiritual community in one’s area.

“Agents often get intimidated by this product,” Bishop said, adding that Globus offers an agent’s guide to faith travel on its web site. “They just have to reach out to a church or community or find someone in those communities to help them grow their business. The church communities are very interested in expanding their reach and fostering unique experiences for their communities.”

Christy Kurian of travel wholesaler Sunspots has seen a different side of the faith travel market, organizing Christian missions to assist with humanitarian efforts, disaster relief or the subsequent rebuilding efforts in destinations all over the world. Notable missions include work in African countries such as Uganda and Burkina Faso, as well as rebuilding efforts in Haiti following the January 2010 earthquake which devastated the country.

“Agencies get the call from missions to help arrange the program and they contact us,” Kurian explained. “Those agents come to us because of our negotiation capacity in the marketplace.”

However, once the work is done, travellers are often looking to experience the destination with a few leisure days attached to the end of a mission, exploring both the secular and religious attractions, according to Kurian.

“If they have two weeks, they’ll usually take four or five days at the end as a vacation."

Tena Reid of Vancouver-based Ellison Travel said that the majority of faith travel packages she books are to important Christian sites in Europe. Those destinations vary on which form their faith takes; in addition to popular destinations such as Vatican City, for some Catholics, pilgrimages to sites where the Virgin Mary is alleged to have appeared, such as Fatima, Portugal and Lourdes, France are significant, while Protestant clients she has worked with opted to explore the sites connected with Martin Luther; with the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation marked in 2017, the milestone is expected to draw thousands of travellers to Germany.

Beyond Europe, Reid said that religious tours to Israel are picking up again, following a decline in bookings due to the renewed conflict in the country in 2014. And while Christian church groups are her biggest clients, she has received interest from Muslim and Buddhist travellers looking to trace the origins of their respective beliefs. Several river cruise companies offering itineraries on southeast Asia’s Mekong River, for example, have included visits to the many wats (Buddhist temples) which dot the landscape of countries like Cambodia and Laos.

While Torontonians are big on exploring their faith during their travels, Reid said that Alberta and Vancouver are the two other major markets she works with.

As for the future of the market, Reid believes it’s a bright one.

“I think as the world gets more unstable, people are turning to faith more and more,” Reid said. “It’s only getting bigger.”

As for any misconceptions related to the faith travel niche, Bishop pointed out that such programs attract a wide range of travellers.

“You have some people saying ‘it’s only going to be an older crowd,’ but we have travellers from all age groups, from people in their 30s to their 60s and even some family groups,” she said. “Perhaps the biggest misconception is that people think you have to be religious to take these tours; it’s really about the history and the culture of the experience that makes it so unique.”