Disaster Tourism Essay

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Disaster tourism The term disaster tourism describes leisure traveling to areas struck by natural disasters. Even though a natural disaster is for the most of the cases an unpleasant and sad event, many tourists pay and travel just because of possibility to see it either during its‘ process or after it to see the consequences. They do it mostly because of curiosity and desire to see something rare. It has been argued that such trips are also seeked by people because of the option of puting our lives into perspective. This type of tourism provides also an option to use it as pedagogical intstrument for communities to make the time of recovery from disasters more effective and shorter.
(Stone, P., & Sharpley, R. 2008) (Faulkner, B. 2001) …show more content…

This attracts not only disaster tourists, but also volunteer tourists, willing to help with the reconstructions and recovery process and also academics and students doing researches about the consequences of disaster and about the disaster tourism itself. It has been said by members of University of British Columbia faculty, that now especially with the global media what we have are all kinds of occasions in which we are confronted by death and disaster and therefore the disaster tourism is kind of a way for people to reconnect in some way of a deep theoretical level, but at the same time people are also very interested in the extraordinary events and experiences. A part of it however, can also be peoples‘ interest to help and many of them are also aware that even this kind of tourism can partly help to rebuild the regions‘ economy.
( University of British Columbia, …show more content…

Several ghost-towns that had to be evacuated because of the radiation are nowadays still uninhabitable and it is not possible to stay in their area for longer period of time without undergoing a risk of diseases caused by radiation. These have now also become a disaster tourist destinations. A town called Namie is located only eight kilometers away from the place of destroyed nuclear power plant and is also a place visited by disaster tourists. There are 10 volunteers guiding people in this abandoned town.
(dw.com, 2016) The Fukushima disaster has highly influenced not just the tourism in Japan, but also in other countries like for example Hawaii, where Japanese people are the number one market segment for international visitors to the islands and also the largest spenders. This fact has made the tourism sector of Hawaii compulsory to investigate situation and try to determine where they might have been able to promote the islands to compensate for the fall in Japanese

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