New approaches to dark tourism inquiry: A response to Isaac

• The role of emotions is likely to be more complex in dystopian dark tourism than is often proposed.
• Tourism benefits from a deeper integration of perspective–especially those found in the fast growing CCT tradition.
• Dark tourism theory development will result from an increase in novel insights.

Dark tourism has become a rather unique realm in the tourism literature and is growing in practice. In order to fully and properly comprehend the phenomena, scholars need to more fervently embrace methods of inquiry beyond narrow positivist approaches. Dark tourism scholars can benefit by integrating techniques and approaches from the realm of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and its related realms of semiotics and aesthetics. Additionally, this paper clarifies the understanding of emotions in dark tourism and dystopian dark tourism experiences and explicates further distinctions between utopia and dystopia.