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In 2018, journalist David Farrier presented a Netflix show called Dark Tourist, which saw him visit places that wouldn’t be on most people’s bucket lists.
There was a Japanese nuclear disaster site, an exorcism in Mexico, and a space station in a former Soviet ‘stan.
Why, you ask? Because they are all examples of ‘dark tourism’, an increasingly popular travel niche that visits destinations historically associated with death, disaster or the macabre.
While the series made the trend mainstream, the term was actually coined in 1996 by academics J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley to describe the growing interest in the past.
Opinions on dark tourism have long been divided, with critics calling it unethical and sometimes unsafe.
Others wonder: If you go somewhere for its historical value, isn’t it just good old-fashioned, regular tourism?
We talk to the experts to learn more.
Dark tourism – is it ethical?
The harshest criticism of dark tourism is that it blurs the line between respectful remembrance and exploitation of human tragedy.
The political scientist Daniel Schatz doesn’t like the term to begin with. But he enjoys visiting destinations that fall within the bracket.
Schatz, who has spent much of his academic and public work investigating dictatorships, political repression and authoritarian propaganda, says Subway that during the trip trend can to be ethical, it is ‘never ethically neutral.’
“The central question is whether a visit fosters a serious historical and political understanding, or whether it turns suffering and repression into a spectacle,” he says.
For Schatz, that distinction is important, especially in authoritarian states.
In North Korea, for example, he explains that tourism is tightly choreographed: visitors are shown a regime-approved version of reality.
Meanwhile, Donald Leka, founder of InAlb, a tour operator in the Albanian capital Tirana, takes around 1,000 tourists through Albania and the Balkans each year, most of them from Britain.
He says almost everyone visits at least one site from the country’s communist past.
This includes Bunk’Art 1, a five-story nuclear bunker outside Tirana, and Bunk’Art 2, the former bunker of the Ministry of the Interior, now a museum of the Sigurimi secret police.
As told Subway that his tours educate travelers about Albania’s communist past, where thousands were killed, imprisoned or sent to internment camps.
Ethically, he believes that the line is not whether you visit, but how you are guided.
“We inform our guides about surviving families, and we treat these as memorial sites, not attractions,” he explains.
‘A good guide makes it history. A bad one makes it a photo stop.’
Where does ‘dark tourism’ end and the story begin?
Schatz is skeptical of the label “dark tourism” if it is applied too widely.
For example, visiting Auschwitz, a battlefield or a former dictatorship for historical and educational reasons is not necessarily dark tourism.
“It can be an act of memory, civic education, and moral seriousness,” he says. ‘The crucial question is the purpose of the visit and whether it treats the victims and history with dignity.’
Leka’s label ‘dark tourism’ does not accurately describe his work.
‘No one books Albania to tour the darkness. They book it to understand the country, and you can’t understand Albania without its 45+ years of communism,’ he says.
Canadian traveler Alicia Recupero, who recently returned from a tour of Albania with the Leka company, agrees.
‘I knew Albania lived through decades of communist dictatorship. Our guide Ergi told us it was considered the most brutal dictatorship in Europe, and I knew the country was isolated from much of the world,’ she says. Subway.
‘But I didn’t understand what this actually meant for ordinary people until I walked through the cold underground corridors.’
She learned about Spaç, the famous political prison where people endured forced labor in terrible conditions.
“What I found impossible to understand was how little it could take to become an enemy of the state,” she says.
‘Imagine coming home after a long day, sitting down to dinner and casually saying, “There wasn’t enough bread in the line today.” (Food was rationed by the communist regime from 1946 to 1991).
“Something so ordinary any of us could say without thinking twice. But under that system, even a complaint about everyday life could be interpreted as criticism of the government, with devastating consequences.”
As a Canadian, Recupero says she was raised to take certain freedoms for granted.
‘Inside that bunker I realized how extraordinary ordinary freedoms really are.’
This is not dark tourism, she says. It is history.
What about safety?
Security depends entirely on the location and nature of the visit.
Regulated historical sites, such as Albania’s bunkers, are built for tourists. They have staff, crowd control and strict security protocols.
Rock somewhere else, such as remote or abandoned places, and it’s a different story.
About two hours from Tokyo is Western Village, an abandoned theme park and urban explorer’s dream. Here, the lack of regulation could represent serious risks, such as roof collapse or limited emergency access.
Similarly, environmental and radiation hazards are very real in disaster zones like Chornobyl or Fukushima – especially if you don’t join a legitimate tour and enter dangerous ‘exclusion zones’ without protection.
There are also the dark tourists who venture into active conflict zones or unstable borders.
Schatz adds that security should not be reduced if tourists are likely to be physically harmed.
In a dictatorship, for example, “visitors operate under arbitrary rules, pervasive surveillance and virtually no meaningful legal protection when something goes wrong.”
Money talks
Fans believe the trend could be good for locals who would otherwise miss out on tourist spending.
“Spaç is a mountain village with a prison and almost nothing else,” says Leka. ‘
Every tour that stops there spends money in a place with no beach, no castle and no other reason to go.’
Then there is Chernobyl.
While the site continues to fuel ethical debates, especially from disaster survival groups that condemn tourists for treating it as an adventure playground or selfie backdrop, there is no denying that it has brought financial and economic benefits to Ukraine.
Between 2017 and 2020, the exclusion zone experienced an unprecedented economic boom, generating around £15.5 million.
It is thought that this surge was largely driven by the success of the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl, and before COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Finally, it seems that dark tourism is subjective – whether it is the destination, the perspective of the travelers or the company that operates the tours and trips.
