AskOxford: Dark tourism, erotourism, familymoon

The travel industry seems to be continually devising novel packages to tempt the more jaded tourist and at the same time other unconventional holiday trends are emerging, giving rise to some noteworthy new words. However, some of the experiences on offer make staying at home look increasingly appealing.

First up is a wide-ranging batch of terms combined or blended with the word tourism.

At the bleaker end of the scale, there's dark tourism, referring to travel to areas associated with death and disaster: this includes visits to former concentration camps, battlefields, and even to contemporary sites of mass destruction such as Ground Zero in New York. Known to the Germans as Gruseltourismus ('shudder tourism'), the term dark tourism can be traced back to 1996, according to Michael Quinion's World Wide Words website.

Of course, not all tourists are part of organized trips: many just gravitate to places that have appeared in the news for all the wrong reasons: the term disaster tourism has been used to describe the phenomenon of travellers visiting areas devastated by natural catastrophes such as the South-East Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, while grief tourism gained prominence in 2002 when significant numbers of people visited the village of Soham in Cambridgeshire after the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

On the more life-enhancing side, those wishing to combine a holiday with charity work can participate in voluntourism (a blend of volunteer and tourism). Voluntourists travel to destinations such as Thailand, Africa, or the Caribbean, where they help out in a local community and explore the area as a holidaymaker at the same time.

Depending on how well you know your significant other, even more fun can be had by those who sample erotourism. The term (the first element comes from Greek eros 'love') was coined by the French writer and 'experimental tourist' Joel Henry and the holiday entails each member of a couple travelling separately to the same destination: without making contact, they then try to find each other, based on their insight into their partner's habits, likes, and dislikes (this could clearly make or break a relationship!).

The next stage for loved-up erotourists might be a babymoon: a blend of baby and honeymoon, this is a holiday for mothers-to-be and their partners in which baby comes too - before he or she is born.

Finally, once a relationship has run its course and both partners have embarked on a new one, they might opt for a familymoon: this was developed to cater for the growing number of newly wedded couples who have children from a previous marriage or other relationship - someone had the clever idea of bringing the family along on the honeymoon too - bliss indeed.