ABSTRACT
School trips comprise a significant market in tourism and dark tourism specifically. Difficult heritage sites appeal to teachers because they extend learning beyond the classroom, deepening on students’ understanding of important historical events. Tour operators offer schools a variety of domestic and overseas trips. These trips provide experiences ranging from touring new cultures to participating in service-learning projects in the aftermath of natural disasters. However, tour operator and chaperone perspectives on school trips do not appear in the literature. Youth perspectives are also conspicuously absent. Moreover, overnight excursions rarely receive researchers’ attention. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to a) summarize the school trip literature, b) identify key parameters of school trips as a unique form of tourism, and c) offer dark tourism researchers a defined framework for studying the specific context of school trips and the implications and challenges thereof.
