The Impact of Coronavirus on Religious Tourism: Is this the End of Pilgrimage?

The present paper, attends to the theme of COVID-19 and its negative effects on the tourism and pilgrimage industries. To be honest, although conclusive findings on this topic are premature in view of the velocity of facts, no less true seems to be that COVID-19 reaffirms a tendency originally stipulated just after 9/11 and declaration of the War On Terror by Bush’s administration. COVID-19 not only has shocked the world cancelling international flights, closing borders and airspaces, making irreparable damages to tourism and hospitality but it has operated on a much deeper level, developing a culture of fear, where ‘other’ is feared and neglected. This point, which was envisaged by the founding parents of sociology, today can be empirically tested with daily facts. At a closer look, hospitality and pilgrimage are inevitably entwined. Hence the thesis this paper holds is that COVID-19 accelerates a moral crisis in Western civilisation that leads the sacred-law of hospitality (at least as the Greeks imagined it) to its death.