Dark Tourism: Perspectives, Post-Disaster Contexts, and Memorial Sites

by Tzung-Cheng (TC) Huan (Editor)

Overview

This book explores the multifaceted world of dark tourism and delves into the evolving perceptions and complex narratives surrounding tourism at sites of tragedy and historical significance.

Divided into three insightful parts, the text explores key aspects of dark tourism. Part I explores changing attitudes toward dark tourism, examining how tourist preferences and gender perspectives influence experiences at sites related to death, disaster, and heritage. Part II investigates how disasters influence tourism, exploring case studies from Cambodia, Thailand, and recent bushfires in Australia, and the impact on tourist behavior and site representation. Part III focuses on how memorials and heritage sites are managed and interpreted, with case studies from concentration camps to cemeteries, shedding light on the ethics of visitation and memory preservation.

Dark Tourism: Perspectives, Post- Disaster Contexts, and Memorial Sites is an essential read for students and scholars of tourism studies as well as for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of dark tourism.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Tourism Recreation Research.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040382172
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/11/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Tzung- Cheng (TC) Huan is Professor at National Chiayi University and former President of Tainan University of Technology, Taiwan. He is also the Editor- in- Chief of Tourism Recreation Research and a member of the UNWTO (United Nations World Tourism Organization) Panel of Tourism Experts. He has been honored by the 2011– 2012 Outstanding Reviewer Award from Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, the 2013, 2017, and 2018 Emerald Literati Awards, and the 2018 Publons Peer Review Award.

Table of Contents

Preface PART I 1. Have we illuminated the dark? Shifting perspectives on ‘dark’ tourism 2. Staging fear: exploring how a dark fun factory is co-performed 3. Tourists’ preferences for attributes and services in battlefield dark tourism itineraries 4. Demystifying destination attachment, self-congruity and revisiting intention in dark tourism destinations through the gender-based lens 5. Bone chapels: who might be interested in visiting and why? 6. Ambiguity and dilution in Kazakhstan’s Gulag heritage PART II 7. Understanding the depersonalisation process in post-disaster sites 8. The photograph: tourist responses to a visual interpretation of a disaster 9. Tragedy and heritage: the Case of Cambodia 10. Tsunami and flash-floods: contrasting modes of tourism-related disasters in Thailand 11. Will tourists travel to post-disaster destinations? A case of 2019 Australian bushfires from a Chinese tourists’ perspective 12. “Another weekend away looking for dead bodies…”: battlefield tourism on the Somme and in Flanders PART III 13. Tourism to the memorial site and museum of the former concentration camp 14. A tale of two camps: contrasting approaches to interpretation and commemoration in the sites at Terezin and Lety, Czech Republic. 15. Medical volunteers as accidental tourists: humanitarianism and the European refugee crisis. 16. Thanatourism’s final frontiers? Visits to cemeteries, churchyards and funerary sites as sacred and secular pilgrimage