London - Last month, TransAsia Airways flight GE-235 crashed shortly after take-off, killing 31 people.
The crash site, in Taipei, represents tragedy for those who lost family members and friends in the disaster, yet to a handful of tourists, it made the perfect background for a holiday snap.
Visiting scenes of death and disaster might seem inappropriate to the average holidaymaker, but dark tourism appears to be on the rise.
Philip Stone is executive director: Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR), School of Sport, Tourism and The Outdoors, University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), Preston, UK.
In his paper, Dark Tourism Scholarship: A Critical Review, he explains: “The act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre - or what has commonly been referred to as dark tourism - is an increasingly pervasive feature within the contemporary visitor economy.
“Indeed, the commodification of death for popular touristic consumption, whether in the guise of memorials and museums, visitor attractions, special events and exhibitions, or specific tours, has become a focus for mainstream tourism providers.”
Introduced in 1996 the term “dark tourism” was brought to the mainstream in 2000, in John Lennon and Malcolm Foley’s book Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster.
Professor Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University, who has written a blog post on death fascination says there are a number of reasons for our interest in the macabre.
“There’s a huge market for witnessing the extremities of human behaviour. Entrepreneurs can exploit that. At the Costa Concordia site people were charging e10 (R130) for tourists wanting to see it.
“There is also now much more of a desire for unique experiences. People want to be involved in pivotal events in history.
“But this is nothing new. People have always flocked towards death - think of public beheadings.”
While tragic, global events appear to trigger an alarming trend for voyeuristic travel.
After the dust settled outside the office of Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical magazine where extremists opened fire, killing 12 people, tourists gathered.
In Australia, social media fans were quick to share their selfies from the site of the Sydney siege, last December, in which a lone gunman held hostage 10 customers and eight employees of a Lindt chocolate café located at Martin Place in Sydney, Australia. Three civilians were killed.
And New York’s Ground Zero, site of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, became - and still is - one of the largest tourist attractions in New York.
Following in the footsteps of the countless tours of the Chernobyl Zone offered in Ukraine, recent reports revealed that the site of Japan’s nuclear disaster Fukushima is now a tourism hot spot.
Four years after the tsunami caused by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake led to the crisis which caused entire towns to evacuate, tourists are queuing up to see abandoned neighbourhoods and crumbling buildings.
“We want to encourage local people for the revitalisation of Fukushima,” tour guide Yusuke Kato told CNN.
The Ugandan Tourism board recently revealed they plan to attract visitors by offering an Idi Amin tourist trail, according to Kenya News 24. Executive director, Stephen Asiimwe said: “Uganda is still widely defined by the acts of the deceased Idi Amin in numerous countries around the world.
“Wherever you go they ask about Amin. He is still stuck in people’s minds.”
Idi Amin Dada ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and allegedly killed thousands of his opponents. His ruthless army is blamed for raping women and looting people’s property.
Most common dark tourism searches:
* Ground zero - site of 9/11 in New York
* Auschwitz - concentration camp, Poland
* Alcatraz - prison, San Francisco
* Pompeii - Italy
* Omaha and Utah beaches - D-Day invasion scenes, France
* Killing fields - Cambodia
* New Orleans - Site of Hurricane Katrina disaster, US
* Chernobyl - Nuclear disaster site, Ukraine
* Giglio, Italy - scene of the Costa Concordia disaster
* Haiti - site of devastating earthquake - sunshine.co.uk
Daily Mail