Traumatic Tourism is a body of work that deals with historically significant sites and their transformation into tourist attractions.
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Trauma tourism is a firmly established practice in Europe. Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the sites of former concentration camps in both Germany and Poland.
Destinations of dark tourism include castles and battlefields such as Culloden in Scotland and Bran Castle and Poienari Castle in Romania; former prisons such as Beaumaris Prison in Anglesey, Wales and the Jack the Ripper exhibition in the London Dungeon; sites of natural disasters or man made disasters, such as ...
Dark tourism (also Thana tourism (as in Thanatos), black tourism, morbid tourism, or grief tourism) has been defined as tourism involving travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy.
This form of tourism attracts many visitors and has its economic benefits to those working in the sector and the area where such a destination is located. However, Dark Tourism often goes hand in hand with ethical dilemmas and critiques, such as the gain of economic profits and the behavior of the visitors.
Why is dark tourism controversial? Despite the positives, there can be negative aspects of dark tourism, too. Avoid tourism sites being run purely for profit rather than to educate, or tour operators and museums that are insensitively sharing the view of both the victims and the perpetrators.
The term “dark tourism” was coined in 1996, by two academics from Scotland, J.John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who wrote “Dark Tourism: The Attraction to Death and Disaster.”
Dark tourism can be educational and help people understand and appreciate history. Dark tourism can also be seen as exploitative and disrespectful to the victims and their families.
While the tourist motivations to visit sites of a sensitive nature may be diverse, dark tourism remains a morally relevant issue that involves a questioning of moral judgment (Rojek,1997; Stone, 2009). It has always raised issues of how morality is collectively conveyed and individually constructed.
Eighty-two percent of American travelers said they have visited at least one dark tourism destination in their lifetime, according to a study published in September by Passport-photo. online, which surveyed more than 900 people.
Defined as travelling to places that are environmentally threatened in order to witness them before it's “too late” and they're gone, doom tourism stretches over the globe, from Antarctica to the melting glaciers in Patagonia, from the Great Barrier Reef to the ever-heating Death Valley in the US.
According to research published in Digital Journal, the global value of the dark tourism market is set to reach $43.5bn by 2031. A significant demographic contributing to its rise in popularity is Gen Z. 91% of Gen Z surveyed in Travel News in 2022 had engaged in some form of dark tourism.
It raises concerns about the moral boundaries of dark tourism and the marketing of places of tragedy and death, while offering them for consumption (Stone, 2009). Selling souvenirs from sites of death effectively commercializes death.
It is a modern tendency where visitors travel to sites of mass destruction, death, or extended suffering. Though the study of dark tourism has been widely expanded over the recent years, less attention was given to the Southeast Asian destinations.