The Protestant Reformation initiated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg celebrates its 500
th anniversary in 2017. The Luther Decade, a large event series lasting from 2008 to 2017, was established to celebrate this major jubilee in Germany. The Luther Decade is an ideal case to illustrate the links between cultural and religious tourism. The complexity of Germany’s political and organizational structures led to an immensely high number of different stakeholders throughout this event series. This research aims to understand some of the major stakeholder collaborations during the Luther Decade. Examples from the cultural and spiritual tourism sector are portrayed, an overview of the public’s financial stake is given, and collaborations between state churches, tourist authorities and private companies are exemplified. A thorough literature review was followed by qualitative interviews with domestic and foreign stakeholders of the Luther Decade, observations at significant places, and two quantitative surveys regarding tourists’ travel motivations to back up qualitative findings and compare to previously conducted research on the topic by other authors. Cultural motivations have proven the most important for tourists attending events of the Luther Decade, with spiritual motivation playing a large but still secondary role among most tourists. Major deviations in respect of travel motivations have been found amongst different source markets, such as the American and Dutch who were primarily spiritually motivated. Both negative and positive examples of stakeholder collaboration have been identified, the complexity of tourism policy and planning was criticized very often. The findings of this research generally matched failures diagnosed by previous researchers and led to a few recommended changes. Attracting spiritual tourists by using the rich Protestant history of the region could be a great chance to increase the share of foreign tourists in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt to more than 10% in the future. These states show proficient skills in using their historical potential for tourism purposes but should yet differentiate and adjust their tourism marketing campaigns to use the potential of foreign Luther pilgrims. Furthermore, marketing, planning and political resources should be pooled and hierarchies should be downsized to enable the development of contextual regional tourism brands instead of limiting it to the political borders of the federal states, respectively outdated and scattered borders of the 20 Evangelic state churches of Germany.