The impact of past painful events on people is increasing day by day with the effect of humanization. Many geographical areas have become tourist destinations for reasons such as sharing these pains, not being forgotten, remembering and remembering those moments. Interest in these destinations is increasing day by day. For this reason, it is necessary to investigate the motivations that trigger these travels, which can be defined as dark tourism, to understand the reasons for travel, to evaluate them from a touristic perspective and to increase the quality of service. Contrary to the general understanding of tourism, sadness tourism stems from unhappy motivations such as sadness and refreshing pain instead of motivations such as being happy, resting and having fun. For this reason, the participants should be considered different from the general tourist type. For the majority of this audience, the reasons to travel are relatively compulsory, and destination options are also limited. Their destinations are determined. It is very difficult to change, but can be changed over time. In order for a place or an event to be the subject of sadness tourism, it must have deeply injured a certain audience. The psychological foundations of sadness tourism are quite strong. In short, tourism can be defined as travel to places that cause sadness and pain. Even if sadness is not the exact equivalent of tourism, travels made for this purpose are given different names in the literature. The most common of these are; Sorrow tourism, pain tourism, mourning tourism, dark tourism, war tourism, fear tourism, shame tourism, death tourism. The places and events that fall within the scope of sadness tourism; technological disasters, torture areas, natural disasters, war zones, genocides, places where famous people died. It is possible to deeply underestimate the impact level of events and areas that are the subject of sadness tourism on visitors.
The purpose of this research; It is aimed to examine the concept of sadness tourism as a type of tourism, determine the areas it covers and the behaviors that motivate tourists to visit. For this purpose, the examples were examined by making a literature review.
Keywords: sadness tourism, dark tourism, war tourism, death tourism, grief tourism, travel motivations