The rise in Grief Tourism or Dark Tourism

Is it real, imagined or constructed? Recent years have seen a rise in grief tourism, dark tourism and disaster tourism, according to media reports. But I wonder if this has any actual foundation, whether the increase is real or whether it's a case of more media reporting, arising from more academic analysis on the phenomena? It would be interesting to see a comparative study on how tourist numbers at specific sites have changed in recent years. The media, as much as the travel industry, values novelty - indeed, the industry is in the business of manufacturing and commodifying novelty, of creating new tourist products that inspire people to travel to their destination - so is it simply a case of old practices being renamed so that they appear new?

Regardless of whether there has been an actual increase in these touristic practices, or simply an increase in coverage of them, I find the phenomena intriguing. Essentially, grief tourism is travel to a place to remember, commemorate and mourn a significant loss of life, such as visits to cemeteries, war memorials and sites of murders. It's a sub-category of dark tourism, which involves travel to places associated with death, tragedy and atrocities, such as battlefields like Gallipoli (which I've been posting about recently), mass graves such as the Killing Fields, and concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. But that visit doesn't necessarily involve mourning or grief, but may be more about education - developing an awareness and understanding of the tragedy, and attempting to better empathize with the suffering - and also entertainment. And then there's disaster tourism, which involves visits to sites of mass destruction such as New York's 'Ground Zero', Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and places where natural catastrophes occurred, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the 2004 tsunami in South-East Asia, and Cyclone Tracey in Darwin. The terms have long been in use - the Germans' use 'Gruseltourismus' or shudder tourism, which I like. So while the discussion of these phenomena might have travelled from academia to the media and to the blogosophere (see the Dark Tourism series on Vagabondish for instance), has there actually been a rise in the practices themselves in recent years? What do you think? And if so, what does this say about tourism and about ourselves as travellers?

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