Travellers are demanding authentic, experientially-oriented opportunities with more meaningful interactions with locals. The sharing economy has emerged partly as a response to these consumer trends with major potential impacts for tourism. This research investigated the phenomenon of authenticity-seeking tourism and its links to the hospitality sector through consumer choices related to accommodation offered by sharing economy providers. It explored the relationship between perceived authenticity of the "local" experience and its significance when purchasing accommodation. The three themes of unique accommodation
This paper will investigate the characteristics of the supply of dark tourism in London, UK through an examination of the identified main dark sites in London, UK. Our methodology is based on web analysis of the presence of marketed and non-marketed dark tourist sites in London, their web visitation, the level of their commercialisation and the characteristics which place them in the various scales as categorised in current literature, notably Stone (2006). We identified that London offers a much more entertainment focussed tourism experience rather than accurate historical and authentic sites which utilised major aspects of dark tourism for purposes such as commemoration or remembrance. The authors found this surprising given London's long and often dark history.
Dark tourism is a topic of increasing interest, but it is poorly understood when considering its significance for mainstream and commercial tourism. This paper investigates the significance of dark tourism in the top ten most visited European tourist cities and proposes a dark tourism index for Europe's tourism cities. MethodologyData was collected from the websites of the cities' Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) using a content analysis methodology, based on keywords related to dark tourism taken from the research literature in this area. Descriptive statistics were produced and the variance between the frequencies of keywords related to each city was analysed for statistical significance. These results were then used to construct a darkness ranking of the cities. FindingsThere are significant differences in the extent to which dark tourism products and services are promoted by the DMOs of Europe's top ten most visited European cities. The ranking of cities by darkness does not correspond to the ranking by visitor numbers, and further qualitative analysis suggests that that the ranking is also independent of the actual presence of dark sites within the destination. This implies that European city DMOs are engaging with the emerging dark tourism market with to varying degrees. Research LimitationsThe purposive sample of ten cities can be extended in future research to increase the validity of the findings of this paper. A further limitation is the selection of keywords for content analysis, which have been developed following the literature review contained below. Future research could develop an extended list of keywords using a systematic review process. Research ValueThis paper shows that it is possible to create a ranking of tourist cities in terms of their darkness, and that this methodology could be extended to a much larger sample size. This links dark tourism research to the urban tourism literature and also offers possibilities for creating a global ranking that could be used by destinations to judge their success in engaging with the dark tourism market, as well as by tour operators seeking to develop products for the same market. Key WordsDark tourism, cities, Europe, content analysis, urban tourism IntroductionThe academic study of dark tourism gathered momentum in the early twenty-first century (Stone 2013), and is reflecting the growing interest of the citizens of postmodern societies in the sites of death and disasters -an interest that needs deeper research to be understood fully.It also reflects the increased sensitivity of the international community to the significance of such events for nations, national identities and the direction of their history. Dark tourism sites offer the opportunity to capture and conserve the "dark" memory of humanity and make it available, through domestic and international tourism, to the wider public. It should also be noted that vicarious thrill seeking and entertainment motivations are also significant factors that have affected the recent growth of t...
Citation for this version held on GALA:Liyanage, Sherry, Coca-Stefaniak, Andres and Powell, Raymond () Dark destinations -Visitor reflections from a holocaust memorial site. London: Greenwich Academic Literature Archive.
Journeys to battlefields or war-related sites are categorised as dark tourism. Dark tourism is travelling to sites associated with death, disasters or atrocities and has emerged as a major tourist attraction (Sharpley, 2009;Lennon and Foley, 2000). As it deals with a wide range of travel related to death and disaster, definitions and descriptions of dark tourism have been eclectic and fuzzy (Sharpley and Stone, 2009). It involves visiting concentration camps, war memorials, cemeteries, scenes of mass murder, horror museums, fields of fatality, sites of natural disasters and perilous places (Dann, 2005), and has been varyingly described as 'morbid tourism' (Bloy, 2000), 'milking the macabre' (Dann, 2005), Thana tourism (Seaton, 1999) 'black spots tourism' or 'sensation sights tourism ' (Rojek, 1997) and 'the heritage of atrocity tourism ' (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996).Battlefield tourism can be defined as travelling to war-related sites to remember and commemorate the fallen focusing on spiritual and emotional experience (Baldwin and Sharpley, 2009). The battlefields and other artefacts associated with warfare have been drawing visitors for many centuries (Kang, et. al., 2012). A trip to war-related sites could take many different forms, and visitor backgrounds, attitudes and their reasons for visiting war-related sites could also vary. This paper
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.