Negative emotions of industrial heritage tourists

Abstract Industrial heritage is a high‐quality tourism resource with distinctive landscapes, technological value, and regeneration potential, distinguishing it from other tourism resources. However, we note that industrial heritage itself has some negative attributes that cannot be ignored, such as environmental pollution, ecological damage, resource depletion, decay scenes, and historical attributes. We chose to focus on tourists' negative emotions and investigated whether these negative attributes trigger tourists' negative emotions through in‐depth interviews, a literature review, and questionnaire surveys. The results reveal that tourists experience negative emotions in response to the negative attributes of industrial heritage; tourists' strongest emotions were irritable, afraid and hostile; negative emotions experienced by tourists were related to their gender, age, occupation, and even the type of sites, and showed significant differences among different groups. We discuss the reasons for these results and propose several suggestions for management.