Sixth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

In the last decades, travelling to places associated with death, disaster, or human suffering has become a significant tourist attraction. This is not a new phenomenon since individuals have long been drawn towards sites and events linked to violence or death (e.g., human sacrifices in pre-Columbian cultures, or medieval public executions). As a business activity, the so-called ‘dark tourism’ is conceived as “an encounter with different kinds of remembrance of mortality and fatality” more than a form of pilgrimage tourism, as it was defined in their original conceptualization. The increasing interest in this type of tourism industry has brought about growing research in this area. The complexity and wide range of tourism activities related to death, suffering, violence, or disaster have resulted in the use of different terms in the literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, no prior works have used a rigorous bibliometric methodology to analyse internal relationships in the literature on dark tourism based on their bibliographic data. In doing so, we make two main contributions. First, the comprehensive review of previous research will be useful for scholars and academics to understand the potential of this study area to become a differentiated research stream, with its own objectives and managerial implications within research on tourism management. Second, this paper identifies the main research topics that require further investigation, contributing to shape a future research agenda.