Transformative journey experiences to heritage sites: a dark tourism spectrum

Dark heritage sites can evolve from being merely sites of tragedy to places that offer transformative experiences for travelers. This qualitative study explores travelers' transformative experiences of Christian pilgrimages after an 8-day Holy Land tour and of Jewish travelers after a 7-day Holocaust sites tour in Poland. Both tours represent different points on the dark tourism spectrum. We explored experiences tapping four domains in which travelers ascribe place meaning to these dark places: personal, spiritual, communal, and global (i.e. broad humanity). The travelers' experiences in these four domains are mapped onto a matrix of cognitive vs. emotional and self-centered vs. other-centered experiences. In addition, place meaning in each of the four domains was found to be reflected differently in each of the transformation stages in the two examined journeys on the dark tourism spectrum. Each domain triggered different transformational processes in both of these journeys. Tourism planners are encouraged to design transformative journeys to dark heritage sites in light of the dynamics of the four place-meaning domains.