**4. Materials and Methods**

Distribution may be achieved fundamentally by concentrating either on isolated tangibles or on aggregated tourism products. While, in theory, the latter would seem a fine choice, this depends on the variables mentioned above, namely their immediate leisure potential, their location, and their impacts. Not all religious historical sites present the same inherent tourism qualities, which also do not necessarily align with other strategic goals, in purely scientific or political terms. Assuming assimilation into larger economic development platforms, primary benefits need to merge with multiple local stakeholder interests, which are inherently nonlinear and oftentimes problematic (e.g., Chen and Chen 2010; Seyfi et al. 2019; Li et al. 2020). The relationship between heritage and residents is generally positive at the abstract level but frequently leads to "not-in-my-backyard" attitudes (Qiu et al. 2019), and it has been empirically demonstrated that residents living farther away from sites have a more favorable perspective on heritage tourism than the ones living in close proximity to the heritage attraction itself (Rasoolimanesh et al. 2019). In the particular cases of ed-Dur and Sir Bani Yas, the lack of adjacent urban pressure invalidates any severe unenthusiastic response to begin with. This does not mean that civic and practical visitor reservations are implicitly nonexistent. Other inconvenient geographical considerations can arguably be factored in, unrelated to issues such as real estate development and rather due to the absence of infrastructures. Heritagization has become such a common reality in any tourism experience that up to 80% of all travel nowadays includes some sort of cultural pursuit, such as gastronomy or shopping (Timothy 2014), not only historical heritage, which means that visitors expect a coherent and varied experience, and that excessive marketing emphasis on archaeology may in fact become counterproductive to leisure demand.

Heritage clusters in the UAE reveal different levels of densification, and specifically, micro-clustering may represent a suitable response to territorial challenges in places away

from large hubs (De Man and Hassan 2022). While niche products do offer interesting branding and marketing opportunities, they always need to be packaged in terms of hospitality. With very few exceptions worldwide, the vast majority of standalone archaeological sites cannot anchor quality supply through intrinsic value alone. Ed-Dur is located a few kilometers from the Khor Al Bidiyah peninsula, where the Umm Al Quwain beachline displays several hotels and resorts and is easily accessible at less than a 1 h drive from Dubai, the main UAE tourism center. Conversely, Al Dhannah, from where one crosses to Sir Bani Yas, is a 250 km highway drive from Abu Dhabi city. The island resorts are located amidst a wildlife reserve within walking distance to the archaeological site. In both cases, the heritage sites enhance an existing leisure product, not the opposite, and are not economically crucial to demand, although they integrate an authentic and sustainable proposition. On the other hand, restoration projects of historical sites attract global investors (Chhabra 2015) and, unsurprisingly, overall visitor satisfaction depends heavily on the quality of cultural heritage destinations (Huh et al. 2006; Domínguez-Quintero et al. 2020). Sir Bani Yas has positioned itself as a nature-based, family-friendly luxury destination. A proposition augmented by the notion of island exclusiveness and the geographical remoteness from any major urban center. It is home to the Arabian Wildlife Park, with an announced 17,000 free-roaming animals and five-star retreats, to which the monastery becomes a marketable addition. While clustering is observable in the example of ed-Dur, integration is less coherent due to perceived distances, city articulations, commodification, and tourism promotion, which can be optimized in the scope of multi-level place branding (Hartman 2022). In which case, all relevant stakeholders would be required to come together and take ed-Dur as a key argument.

Apart from partaking in archaeological and conservational solutions, governmental involvement with both the temple and the monastery comprises tourism branding ventures. The promotion of the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Umm Al Quwain is designed on strategic axes, plugging into a common federal vision whilst offering location-specific distinctiveness. Destination branding has been instrumental to the successful diversification policy of the UAE (Ahmed et al. 2022) and to the individual emirates (Balakrishnan 2008; Westwood 2012; Kotsi and Michael 2015; Al Saed et al. 2020), which offer singular tourism value propositions based on their cultural landscapes. The national economic vision embraces the diversity of the respective tourism potential, which is very noticeable in the northern emirates, where the added value of local heritage does not gravitate around the large distribution structures of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In fact, Umm Al Quwain, Ajman, Fujairah, and Ras Al Khaimah are exemplary dimensioned, emirate-level tourism systems, and they have been promoting their unique territorial attributes (Daleure 2017), as is the case in Sharjah (Alsalami and Al-Zaman 2021), a much larger, coast-to-coast emirate with a capital city in logistical and physical contiguity with Dubai, and with solid heritage destination branding activity (Saji 2017). In fact, the tourism authorities of all emirates provide digital outreach channels that reflect, precisely, archaeological and historical destinations blended with natural heritage. Ed-Dur is central to the cultural offerings on the government of Umm Al Quwain's Department of Tourism and Archaeology website and is presented as vastly significant, albeit detached from the hotel and investment-related section. Potential forthcoming commodification, either private or public, might densify partnerships between hospitality stakeholders and not only the temple of Shamash but the entire site. In turn, the monastery at Sir Bani Yas is managed by the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, and the emirate's dedicated tourism site highlights the island, suggesting a Desert Islands Resort and Spa Culture Tour that includes the archaeological site. Along with immediate commercial interest and archaeological research, the long-term return on investment is multilayered, based on a longstanding policy of tolerance within the United Arab Emirates. In 2017, some thirty Christian ecclesiastics from the Gulf region and the then Minister of State for Tolerance, Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, gathered at the monastery of Sir Bani Yas, in the context of the government's Tolerance Agenda, representing a particularly symbolic convergence between religion, archaeology, and heritage tourism. Subsequent

activities, such as the official reopening of the site in 2019, during the Year of Tolerance, included the presence of the Apostolic Vicar of Southern Arabia, which occurred in the wake of Pope Francis' historic visit to the UAE a few months earlier. These protocolar events do considerably enhance the public significance of the site.

Comparative regional results reveal a need for tackling management concerns, with multiple Saudi, Omani, and Qatari sites facing not only environmental, conservation, and interpretation challenges but also generic tourism-related issues and, more precisely, the use of religious sites for heritage tourism (Kessler and Raj 2018; Al-Tokhais and Thapa 2020; Rico 2020). In addition to integrated online communication and business-related platforms, digital data acquisition of the building features and ensuing processing, for instance, as 3D models, empowers both academic and societal actors and leads to a more refined construal of archaeological realities. This ultimately becomes critical for composing outreach and cultural tourism products (e.g., Egger and Neuburger 2020; Liritzis et al. 2021; Ugwitz et al. 2021; Yin et al. 2021).
