Tourists’ intention to visit dark tourism destinations in Malaysia

Dark tourism is a contemporary act of travel where people visit a real or associated site of death, suffering and disaster. For the past two decades, there are growing literature focuses on dark tourism phenomenon. However, previous literature is mainly concentrated on the western perspectives. Dark destinations are still an unfamiliar tourism product to the emerging market. Specifically, there are limited studies on tourists’ behaviors in visiting dark tourism destinations from the Southeast Asian countries. Furthermore, previous literature only focuses on few consumer behaviors dimensions to investigate tourists’ behavior such as motivation, experience, and emotion. Very little studies have explored tourists’ actual intention to engage with dark tourism. In Southeast Asia, for example, Malaysia has yet to fully embrace dark tourism as a potential tourism product in the country. There are only few literatures cited on dark tourism available in Malaysia. Also, there are very few studies that explore tourists’ behavioral intention in Malaysia context. Therefore, the current study aims to determine tourists’ level of intention to visit dark tourism in Malaysia. Researcher also investigated the effect of attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, motivation and the ontological security on tourists’ intention to visit dark tourism destinations in the country. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is used as the underpinning theory for this research to explore tourist intention. The present study also added two variables: motivation and ontological security to provide a more comprehensive understanding of factors influencing tourist intention to visit dark destinations. Ontological security is referring to the people state of mind. It provides a sense of order and continuity and meaning to our daily action. The absent of ontological security were suggested to result in people feeling anxiety towards death, thus arouse the need to engage with dark tourism. A quantitative study was carried out to meet the objectives of this study. A self- administered survey was distributed to 335 visitors at selected potential dark tourism destinations in Malaysia. A total of 251 cleaned responses was used to analyze the final data output. The data collection was done in February 2018 until October 2018, covering four states in Malaysia: Sabah, Penang, Perak and Malacca. Findings show that attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, motivation and ontological security have positive relationship with tourists’ intention to visit dark tourism destination. Particularly, the perceived behavioral control (0.838) and attitude (0.522) have large effect on tourists’ intention. There is no difference in both international and domestic tourists’ intention to visit dark destination. Overall, the result also indicates high level (81.6%) of intention among tourists to visit dark tourism destinations in Malaysia. This research contributes to the body of knowledge regarding perceptions on dark tourism destinations in Malaysia and provided a better understanding of factors influencing tourist intention to visit dark tourism destinations. This research also offered valuable insights for the practitioner by highlighting the potential and opportunities for dark tourism in the country.

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