Dark Tourism Storytelling and Trauma Narratives: Insights from Romanian Promotional (Tourism) Campaigns

Dark tourism communication in Eastern Europe remains insufficiently examined, despite the region’s complex post-authoritarian memory landscape and the growing use of storytelling in tourism marketing. This study aims to clarify how Romanian dark tourism campaigns construct meaning through narrative structures and affective framing. Using a qualitative multi-method design, the analysis integrates ten promotional campaigns and six semi-structured interviews with professionals from tourism, memorial institutions, and cultural organizations. Results reveal four recurrent narrative–affective clusters, sacral-memorial, historical-didactic, spectral-sensational, and hybrid commercial, each shaped by trauma referentiality, emotional framing, and specific calls-to-action. These configurations map consistently onto Stone’s thanatological spectrum and highlight how practitioners negotiate authenticity and ethical boundaries. The study contributes a transferable narrative–affective model for dark tourism communication and underscores the need for transparency, contextual sensitivity, and responsible storytelling in the marketing of trauma-related heritage.