The turn of the century has brought many global risks that have transformed
radically the morphology of the tourist system. These risks include terrorism, climate
change, and the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. The next normal was a term coined
in this book chapter to denote the passage of the new normal to a state of normalization
where the COVID-19 restrictions have been incorporated into daily life. Henceforth,
the next normal evinces a radical shift in travel behavior. As discussed, COVID-19 not
only accelerated an unparalleled crisis in the tourism industry but also aligned with the
changes produced after the turn of the century. Traveling freely in a risky world
facilitated the introduction of technologies that changed radically the morphology of
tourism. The Apollonian sense of beauty, as well as the physical displacement, should
be at the best revisited by scholars. To be honest, I do not know –paragraphing Gale- if
tourism has gone extinct, but it was radically mutated into a new skin. In this book
chapter, I have criticized the notion of dystopian dark tourism, offering a broader
spectrum that includes other types of tourism as virtual tourism, last chance tourism, or
even creative tourism. My model is based on five elements, which include the ego
factor, playful experience (impossible to share with others), the co–presence–absence
of the “Other”-, the ideological recovery of the past, and the voyeurism of resignation
(adaptation).
Keywords: Dystopian dark tourism, Narcissism, Technology, Tourism crisis, Tourism’s forms.
