Investigating the motivation-experience relationship in a dark tourism space: A case study of the Beichuan earthquake relics, China

This study identifies implications of dark tourism and describes how tourists and destinations, which are principal collateral cores, define what constitutes dark travel. The study also examines the dimensions of dark tourism motivation and experience and finds that the former partly affects the latter. The exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis aimed to examine why tourists approach and engage with disaster sites and how such experiences may affect tourists motivation and emotional reaction. It is the first paper that applies structural equation modelling to dark tourism research. We focus on the causal relationships between dimensions of motivation and experience, and the relationship that the emotional reactions effect on tourist experiences. We find that the curious visitors are likely to engage cognitively by learning about the incident or related issues and tourists' emotional reaction to the dark space influence more heavily emotional tourist experiences than cognitive experiences do. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.