Motivations & Experiences of Senior Tourists at Dark Sites: A Case Study of Lushun Prison Museum

The phenomenon of dark tourism has recently garnered significant academic interest. However, the literature on this topic has predominantly focused on younger demographics, leaving a notable gap in understanding the motivations and experiences of senior tourists. This study aims to address this research deficit by integrating the push???pull theory with the multifaceted model of visitor experience. To this end, we have adopted a semistructured interview method and selected the Lushun Prison Museum in Liaoning Province, China, as our research site. By coding semistructured interviews with 50 senior tourists using NVivo software, the findings revealed that senior tourists exhibited four motivations: education, remembrance, sightseeing, and curiosity. These motivations corresponded to seven experiential dimensions: cognitive, introspective, emotional, sensory, hedonic, relational, and transformative experiences. The article also constructs theoretical relationships between motivation and experience, demonstrating how educational motivation is related to cognitive and introspective experience, remembrance motivation is associated with emotional experience, sightseeing motivation is correlated with sensory, hedonic, and relational experience, and curiosity motivation is associated with transformational experience. Considering the correlation between motivation and experience, this article puts forward five actionable recommendations for senior tourists, with the aim of providing both theoretical support and practical guidance for the management and development of dark tourism destinations.