religious commodification

Every year, millions of people travel across the globe for different intentions. It may be for business, recreation, education, health, and faith. Traveling to religious sites has been accounted for in the bible and can been considered as one of the oldest reasons for travel and is a vast growing sector even today. Tourist visit cultural or religious site for that matter for a variety of reasons (Ho & McKercher, 2006). According to Levi and Kocher, the purpose of visiting sacred sites may from the purposeful tourist who is seeking authentic cultural experiences to the casual tourist who may be visiting a religious site because it is part of their tour.
Religion plays an enormous role of the culture in Asia. Consequently, Religions have inspired the construction of some of the most spectacular monuments in the region and all forms of art and architecture find expression in them. However, religious tourism has not been fully exploited due to the high sensitivity of the subject, the lack of scientific data and its overwhelming domestic nature (UNWTO 2011).
Tourism at religious or sacred site is a special type of cultural heritage tourism (Shackley,2001). With the introduction of the Christian faith to the Philippines during the 1500s, many church edifices has been constructed all throughout the country and has been celebrated as one of the major tourist attractions even up to the present time. Preservation of such religious sites is at utmost importance in order for tourist as well as the community to pursuit using the site. However, Inappropriate tourist activities and commercial development can lead to the trivialization of the site (Mckercher & du Cros, 2002). Therefore, the religious site loses its authenticity whenever practices are commercialized and turned into a commodity tourist can easily avail. Hence, religious commodification emerges.
Wikipedia defines commodification as the “transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other entities