Tel Aviv, Israel - When Pope Benedict visits the Holy Land next month it will be a gift to Israel's tourist industry that will just go on giving.
The global religious tourism industry is worth an estimated $18bn, and 150 million people travel as Christians each year.
So lucrative has the market become that the Pope's visit to the Middle East is expected to generate $50m - $60m for Israel alone.
All 6,700 hotel rooms in Jerusalem have been booked for the week of his trip, with similar demand at hotels around the Dead Sea, Nazareth, Tiberias and Tel Aviv.
If the visit of Pope John Paul II in 2000 is anything to go by, the benefits will be long term.
The Israeli Tourism Ministry says visits by Christians to the country have increased by 17% since the last Pope prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
The West Bank will be hoping to benefit from the influx of Christian pilgrims, as Pope Benedict travels to Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, and to Nazareth, where he lived.
Now another country containing many of the most important Biblical sites, Jordan, is trying to secure a bigger slice of the tourism cake.
While Israel has more than a million specifically Christian visitors each year, Jordan's share is only between 3,000 and 5,000.
So the Hashemite Kingdom is working on improvements to its principal pilgrimage sites, such as Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan, where Jesus is believed to have been baptised.
The site - on the east bank of the Jordan River - was the focus of conflict between Jordan and Israel.
Now the Jordanians are surveying, excavating and restoring it for an influx of visitors.
Pope Benedict has described such sites as "places sanctified by [Jesus's] earthly passage".
While he is in Jordan the Pope will visit other colourful and significant Biblical sites, including Mount Nebo where Moses is believed to have first seen the promised land.
But Jordan - which occupies the territory once known as Canaan - has many other places familiar from the Bible, which tourist officials are keen to promote, whether or not the Pope goes to them in May.
Jordan's Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Maha al-Khatib, has been to the Vatican to brief the Pope and talk about how Christians might get more out of their visits to holy places in Jordan.
They include Um Qays - the Gadara of the Bible - where that early exorcism, the miracle of the Gadarene swine, took place.
Another location designated by the Vatican as a pilgrimage site is Anjara, which Jesus and his mother, Mary, are said to have passed on journeys between the Sea of Galilee, Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan and Jerusalem.
But Jordan wants to build on the expected windfall in Christian tourism to boost its wider tourism industry, what Mrs al-Khatib has described as the "unique diversity of Jordan's touristic sites".
There's too much at stake to let this opportunity go begging.