The death tourism as a cultural phenomenon

Abstract

Even though contemporary tourism is based on the idea of apleasurable change, a leave from routine and everyday activities, the expectations of visitors to the sites of catastrophes and death are shaped according to different rules. These trips have named by scholars of the phenomenon as another kind of tourism “dark tourism” or “thanatotourism”. The fascination with death seems to be nothing exceptional nor new in our culture, however treating death as acommodity designed for consumption seems to be a totally new aspect of it. The article conceptualises this more and more common phenomenon. the author addresses somekey problems of the visitors’ motivation and points to research problems and methods of the death tourism as a new social and cultural phenomenon.