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This interdisciplinary empirical study originally bridges urban studies, memorial heritage, and dark tourism, using novel methods to analyse Tripadvisor reviews for the purposes of destination planning. It demonstrates that dark tourism has recently gained popularity in Sarajevo’s complex urban area, emerging as the most promising tourism trend, capable of extending tourism to the city’s edges. Its consumption is largely educational, transformative, and emotional, fostering a connection with the victims. This study addresses the literature gap by offering recommendations for public sector stakeholders who aim to meet the needs of non-local visitors. It is recommended that they systematically support the development of dark tourism within urban tourism plans, while respecting the local community’s sensibility toward the tragedies related to the Bosnia and Herzegovina civil war, with outside intervention in the 1990s. This research contributes to urban and dark tourism studies in this context, offering also wider theoretical, methodological, and practical implications.
Sanja Dolenec (Tue,) studied this question.