To begin with, the initial aim of the current dissertation is the identification of the
tourists’ general beliefs regarding the concept of dark tourism, the visitors’ emotions
related to visits to specific dark tourism monuments and the internal motives that
serve as driving forces for tourists who decide to visit dark tourism spots of interest.
At the same time, the dissertation sets as a second main goal to investigate whether
the nowadays representation of the dark tourism attractions in Greece is representative
of the historical background and if it captures effectively the horrific events that took
place in the past. This issue was approached both by literature review and primary
quantitative research. The literature review focuses on the conceptual approach of
dark tourism, the review of dark tourism, its related terms, tourists’ motives and
emotions. The primary quantitative research is based on a structured questionnaire
and the research sample consists of 181 Greek and foreign tourists. Based on the data
of our analysis, we came to the conclusion that dark tourism affects moderately the
further development of the overall Greek tourism sector, as the alternative and the rest
types of tourism do as well, despite the fact that it is a tourism type that it is not
satisfyingly well-known to tourists. The Greek monuments that belong to the field of
dark tourism are nowadays moderately represented and described as tourism
attractions, given both their historical significance and their tragic dimension. The
most intense emotion of the tourists during their visit to dark tourism monuments is
sadness and the weakest is fear, while their strongest motive is the interest on tragic
historical incidents and the weakest one is visiting historical monuments of dark
tourism as a necessity to get acquainted with death. Overall, the most important
finding of this primary research is that the result is statistically significant and that
there is a positive correlation among dissonance, motives and emotions which
signifies that there is a relationship among the three variables and that they affect each
other positively. Besides, it was proved that people who have experienced the death of
their partner and a divorce are feeling more intense feelings than the other ones who
have not similar experiences so far.
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