Dark personality traits and dark tourism sites: Analysis of review generation and consumption behaviors

Abstract

The present study is one of the pioneering research attempts to understand the review generation and consumption behavior of tourists with dark personality traits while visiting dark tourist sites. We analyzed 124,074 reviews related to 12 sites of dark touristic interest in the USA, China, India, Poland, Japan, Thailand, and Germany. To control for the city-specific effect, we selected 12 non-dark sites from the same cities as a reference point of comparison. Our findings show that dark tourist sites significantly moderate the review generation and consumption behavior of tourists with dark personality traits. The findings fill the existing theoretical gaps in the dark tourism scholarship, and provide practical implications for destination marketing organizations related to dark tourism sites.