Exploring travellers’ experiences when visiting Verdun battlefield: a TripAdvisor case study

ABSTRACT

This study contributes to research on the tourist’s experience of a battlefield site by comparing the way they report on the different sub-sites belonging to it, and by using an integrated approach. We focused on Verdun, a major site of the Great War in France, composed of different sub-sites (memorials, forts, trenches, etc.). By analysing 1,581 online reviews posted by tourists on the TripAdvisor website between 2012 and 2017, our findings reveal that tourists report differently on each sub-site, highlighting the relational and emotional dimensions of their experience. Our results first suggest that the site’s degree of darkness and commodification influence the relational dimension of their experience by generating or not a deep empathy relationship. We then reveal that while the events took place more than a century ago, the emotional dimension of their experience is still deep, thanks to the preservation of the site’s dark attributes.

KEYWORDS:

• battlefield
• dark tourism
• emotions
• tourist experience
• TripAdvisor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure verified the sampling adequacy for the analysis – KMO = .91 – and all KMO values for individual items were >0.73. Bartlett’s test of sphericity indicated that correlations between items were sufficiently large for PCA.

2 The nickname given to the soldiers during this battle.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Funds for Regional Research (FEDER, Fond Européen de Recherche Régionale); MSH-Lorraine (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme).