The Long Tail of Tourism: Holiday Niches and their Impact on Mainstream Tourism

Abstract

Guided bus tours giving tourists the eligibility to enter and take photos of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, wandering around the radioactive fields of Chernobyl, visiting the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau and travelling to prisons such as Alcatraz Island (Freire-Medeiros, 2008, p. 3), all exemplify the phenomenon of dark tourism. Stone defines dark tourism as ``the act of travel and visitation to sites, attractions and exhibitions which has real or recreated death, suffering or the seemingly macabre as a main theme'' (2008).