Shedding light upon the shadows: Exploring the link between country destination image and dark tourism

Dark tourism is one of those tourism types that currently attracts growing interest and varying interpretations. The present study aims to determine the importance of specific dark tourism motives (namely those relevant to war and terrorism) for dark tourism development, taking destination and country image into consideration. The research was carried out in the context of Turkey, a developing country, which exhibits dark tourism potential in relation to the motives explored. An explanatory quantitative approach was followed. The results reveal the importance of motivations, previous experience, intention to visit and the significance of different tourism types according to destination image in a tourism context. The findings shed light on aspects that can drive dark tourism development, without falling into the fallacy of prioritizing a “better mousetrap (dark tourism site) that nobody will want”.