The current situation of the travel business has become rather distant from a profitable business unlike in the past. It is in a fierce competition situation; an era has come when failure to establish special know-hows or large sale sales network results in dying out in the market right away. Like this, while the trend of the travel business is changing, travelers' behaviors have also undergone changes from quantitative tourism to qualitative tourism, from traveling tourism to staying tourism, and from group tourism to individual tourism, and the quality of travel experiences and the whole process of services have become a key task of tourism. Therefore, travelers' desires are expected to be all the more diversified, specialized, and subdivided. In response to such demands by customers, travel agencies specializing in special interest tourism SIT, which are just a small number, came to emerge little by little and the market is steadily growing every year. Under such circumstances, some package travel agencies made diverse attempts to enter the SIT travel market, a blue ocean, by scouting employees of other companies or merging with small- and medium-sized SIT agencies, but it was difficult to learn know-hows accumulated for a long time merely by scouting employees or merging. Nonetheless, even now, travel agencies that specialize in selling ordinary packages are constantly striving for revenues and emulating other companies' schedules just for travelers' visit without thorough preliminary investigation or preparation, or are providing low quality travel not meeting travelers' desires, which led to continuous occurrence of consumers' dissatisfaction that even resulted in lawsuits between consumers and travel agencies. In order to overcome such reality, the travel industry came to need specialized and subdivided travel agencies, in other words, travel agencies for SIT. At present, the representative SIT travels differentiated in the travel market are divided into sports travel, international meeting travel, environment travel, culture and art travel, and pilgrimage travel based on religious pilgrimages. Although the forms of travel are changing much according to changes in travelers' desires, tourism businesses in the current market are failing to actively and aggressively cope with market changes. Based on the researcher's experiences in the travel industry and the need for research formerly mentioned, this study aims to figure out the factors for selection of pilgrimage goods satisfying customers' preferences and demands centered on Catholic pilgrimages, thereby providing information on Catholic pilgrimage goods, and at the same time developing pilgrimage goods desired by customers, and presenting the logic and practical measures to develop pilgrimage goods and establish marketing strategies for such goods. Based on this study, the researcher hopes that more pilgrims are encouraged to select SIT agencies suitable for their purpose, travel agencies faithfully plan travel programs suitable for their customers' purposes and form manpower appropriate for such programs and establish education and systems, enabling the self-purified industry climate of the travel industry to be formed realizing genuine customer satisfaction through establishment of education and systems, and also hope the tourism industry will steadily go on even after time passes.
This study intended to examine the preference structure of users of pilgrimage goods in selecting such goods, clarify the factors significantly affecting their purchase decisions, and also divide and analyze respondents by psychographics, level of involvement, and demographics through conjoint analysis to verify the validity of market segmentation. In order to achieve such study purposes more specifically, first, this study figured out the relative importance of major attributes during purchase of pilgrimage goods by the entire respondents and examined the level of attributes with the best efficiency values of each attribute. Then, this study divided the market for Catholic pilgrimages using psychographics, level of involvement, and demographic statistics, thereby understanding relative importance of major attributes during purchase of pilgrimage goods by each group and looked at the level of attributes with the highest utility values. The result was that regarding the degree of importance of major attributes in goods attributes, the pilgrimage region was the greatest selection attributes, followed by price, and then guide and specialization with the same level of consideration. Thus, the conclusion is that new companies that intend to enter the SIT travel market and travel agencies specialized in existing pilgrimages should analyze their own travel goods and pay close attention in selecting pilgrimages, while goods for pilgrimage to Europe (the birthplace of Virgin Mary) among pilgrimage destinations should be much planned and sales should focus on the goods related to this place. In addition, existing research on pilgrimages merely emphasized aspects of religious perspectives and there was no more detailed and subspecialized analysis, but this study presented an aspect of market development about Catholic pilgrimage among religious tourism. Nevertheless, this study has the following limitations. This study concerned Catholics residing in Daegu and Gyeongbuk and given that the travel types across the nation tend to differ, follow up research on Catholic believers and clergymen in other parishes is considered necessary. Second, when selecting goods for Catholic pilgrimages, demands by ordinary believers were reflected but given that those who mostly influence selection of travel goods are clergymen, the sample size of clergymen was relatively small. Third, it is difficult to apply this study to the current market given the actual pilgrimage market flow and goods' costs. Therefore, by analyzing costs of pilgrimage goods provided by travel agencies, a realistic market standard should be established. If the above points are complemented in future research, it is expected that more specialized and sound religious tourism market will be formed.