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The purpose of this paper is to put forward the argument that New Zealand’s tourism industry generally fails to acknowledge the importance of the access market. Despite anecdotal evidence of the market’s value and strong legislation, New Zealand’s access market arguably remains underserviced and misunderstood. The current research sought to explore social and business rationales to support a future for accessible tourism in New Zealand, from the perspectives of its key stakeholders. It sought to uncover contemporary issues in the tourism industry, to examine the capacity and context for which issues can be addressed and overcome, to achieve a future for accessible tourism in New Zealand.

Under the interpretive paradigm, original, exploratory research was conducted. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with ten key New Zealand tourism industry stakeholders who agreed to participate in the research. Qualitative data were thematically analysed. The following five key themes inductively emerged from the data: “Accessibility as a human right: Developing a culture of accessibility”; “Accessible tourism: Good for business?”; “Bottom-up, market-led approach”; “Leadership from the top: Moving from apathy to action”; and “Meeting somewhere in the middle”. The five themes correspond to themes evidenced in the wider literature and present propositions for the future development of accessible tourism in New Zealand.

Findings revealed stakeholder opinions of an industry exemplifying minimal awareness and consideration for accessibility. Accessibility was perceived to be an issue of social change, requiring the achievement of a cultural shift where accessibility is envisioned as a cultural norm necessary for the future. Whilst top-down leadership and support were deemed pertinent, ownership and accountability were seen to be crucial at the lower, operational levels of the industry. A “meeting in the middle” was reported necessary to see the leveraging of a greater push towards accessibility and emphasising more prominently, what has been and can be done, moving forward into the future.

This paper provides original insights into the current and future scope of accessible tourism in New Zealand from the perspectives of its stakeholders. The key themes derived from the research assist knowledge for aligning the industry on a pathway towards achieving the necessary awareness and collaboration required in order to offer accessible tourism experiences to all.

The purpose of this paper is to propose voyeurism as one possible lens to analyse the experiential nature of dark tourism in places of socio‐political danger, thus expanding psychoanalytic understandings of those who travel to a “dark” place.

Freud's and Lacan's theories on voyeurism are used to examine the desire to travel to and gaze upon something that is (socially constructed as) forbidden, such as a place that is portrayed as being hostile to international tourists. A qualitative and critical analysis approach is employed to examine one tourist's experience of travelling to Iran and being imprisoned as a result of taking a photograph of what he thought was a sunrise but also pictured pylons near an electrical plant.

The authors' analysis of the experiences of this tourist in Iran reveals that tourism, in its widest sense, can be experienced as “dark” through the consumption and performance of danger. This finding moves beyond the examination of dark tourism merely as “tourist products”, or that frame a particular moment in time, or are merely founded on one's connection to or perception of the site.

Whilst the authors recognise the limitations of the case study approach taken here, and as such, generalisations cannot be inferred from the findings, it is argued that there is merit in exploring critically the motivational and experiential nature of travel to places that may be considered forbidden, dangerous or hostile in an attempt to further understand the concept of dark tourism from a tourist's lived perspective.

As the authors bring voyeurism into the debate on dark tourism, the study analyses the voyeuristic experiences of a dark tourist. In short, the authors argue that the lived and “deviant” experiential nature of tourism itself can be included in the discussion of “dark tourism”.