Exploring Aceh Tsunami Museum Visitors’ Motivation, Experience and Emotional Reaction

Abstract

This study explores how the Aceh Tsunami Museum visitors' motivation and experience affect their emotional reactions. The study expands current theorisations by examining the merits of emotional reaction in visitors' behaviour models. A total of 384 visitors completed a self-administered survey via online forms. The results show that visitors' emotional reaction is affected by motivational factors and their experience visiting the museum. This study fills in the gaps in the limited research on visitors' motivations, experiences, and emotional reactions to the dark museum site. From a practical perspective, this one of the early studies proving that the Aceh Tsunami Museum is well perceived as a popular dark tourism site and can be promoted as a potential niche tourism product by the Aceh government.

Evolving Themes in Dark Tourism Research

“…Further, like past studies, we also observe a lack of studies combining the multistakeholder's perspective while studying the impact of dark tourism at a destination. The cluster of studies on visit motives and post-visit experiences focuses on identifying the motives of the dark tourists (Biran et al, 2011;Mudzanani, 2014), their post-visit emotional experiences (Hanafiah et al, 2021;Lee, 2015), and their engagements with the destinations. However, most of the studies consider visitors as those directly or indirectly influenced by the calamity as the potential visitor for a dark tourism destination.…”