Journeys Of Discovery In Volunteer Tourism

Offers an insight into how volunteer tourism is growing and developing. This title includes case studies from researchers in the field which explore the experiences of the volunteer tourist and the relationships between volunteers and host communities and commercial, non-commercial and government entities involved in volunteer tourism.

Just a generation ago the notion that holidays should be invested with ethical and political significance would have sounded odd. Today it is part of the lifestyle political landscape. Volunteer tourism is indicative of the growth of lifestyle strategies intended to exhibit care and responsibility towards others less fortunate, strategies aligned closely with developing one’s ethical identity and sense of global responsibility. It sits alongside telethons, pay-per-click, Fair Trade and ethical consumption generally as a way to “make a difference”. Volunteer tourism involves a personal mission to address the political question of development. It draws upon the private virtues of care and responsibility and disavows political narratives beyond this. Critics argue that this leaves the volunteers as unwitting carriers of damaging neoliberal or postcolonial assumptions, whilst advocates see it as offering creative and practical ways to build a new ethical politics. By contrast, this volume analyses volunteer tourism as indicative of a retreat from public politics into the realm of private experience, and as an expression of diminished political and moral agency. This thought provoking book draws on development, political and sociological theory and is essential reading for students, researchers and academics interested in the phenomenon of volunteer tourism and the politics of lifestyle that it represents.

Volunteer Tourism is one of the major growth areas in contemporary tourism, where tourists for various reasons seek alternative goodwill experiences and activities. To meet this demand there has been a surge in volunteer programmes offered in range of destinations organized by a variety of charities and tour operators which is predicted to continue to grow in the future. Volunteer Tourism provides an in-depth analysis of the complex issues associated with traditional and contemporary volunteer tourism. Reflecting the growth in this phenomenon, this book provides a cohesive collection of chapters written from a range of international expert scholars and researchers. The theoretically rich, practically applied and empirically grounded contributions are based on current and diverse research in the area. This groundbreaking volume explores topics which have not been addressed in the literature before, such as the impact on host communities, introducing new areas and ideas to the field. The diverse range of themes are identified and addressed, including volunteer tourism and sustainability to, uniquely, the examination of volunteer tourism stakeholders – volunteers themselves, the host-to-guest exchange, and the organizations – and management of volunteers. These themes are examined in a range of international case studies, demonstrating the wide range of issues associated with volunteer tourism. This volume is a timely addition offering an innovative approach to the area. Volunteer Tourism will be of interest to both students and researchers interested in tourism, leisure and development, as well as non-academics, practitioners, NGOs government officials at all levels.

Crossing disciplinary and chronological boundaries, Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times is the first full-length treatment of volunteer tourism from a longitudinal ethnographic perspective. Volunteer tourism, one of the fastest growing niche tourism markets in the world, is a type of tourism in which tourists pay to participate in conservation, humanitarian or development oriented projects. Volunteer Tourism is a comprehensive and comparative study of the perspectives of Thai host community members, NGO practitioners and international volunteer tourists. The book thus shines an ethnographic lens onto the complexities and contradictions of the volunteer tourism experience in northern Thailand. Drawing on cross-disciplinary perspectives in geography and anthropology as well as development, tourism and cultural studies, Volunteer Tourism illustrates how a focus on sentimentality in the volunteer tourism encounter obscures the structural inequalities on which the experience is based. Such a focus situates volunteer tourism within the commodification and sentimentalization of development and global justice agendas, which hail the new moral consumer and reframe questions of structural inequality as questions of individual morality. As a result, albeit inadvertently, the practice of volunteer tourism serves the continued expansion of the cultural logics and economic practices of neoliberalism.

As researchers in emerging economies, scientists are often the first foreign visitors to stay in remote rural areas and, on occasion, form joint venture ecotourism and community tourism projects or poverty alleviation schemes between local agencies or NGOs, the local community, and their home institution or agency. They therefore can contribute to avenues for the conservation of natural resources and the development of rural communities as well as influencing the future tourism development through its perceived legitimacy and the destination image it promotes. This book for the first time critically reviews tourism debates surrounding this emerging market of scientific and research oriented tourism. It is divided into three inter-related sections. Section 1 sets the stage of the discourse of scientific research in tourism; Section 2 evaluates the key players of scientific tourism looking particularly at the roles of NGOs, government agencies and university academic staff and Section 3 contains case studies documenting the niche of researchers as travelers in a range of geographical locations including Tanzania, Australia, Chile, Peru and Mexico. The title’s multidisciplinary approach provides an informed, interesting and stimulating addition to the existing limited literature and raises many issues and associated questions including the role of science tourism in tourism development and expansion, the impacts of scientific and research-based tourism, travel behaviors and motivations of researchers to name but a few. This significant volume will provide the reader with a better understanding of scientists as travelers, their relationship to the tourism industry, and the role they play in community development around tourism sites. It will be valuable reading for students and academics across the fields of Tourism, Geography and Development Studies as well as other social science disciplines.

Recent years have seen an explosion in research on tourism volunteering. Volunteers are an essential part of tourism, whether they are volunteering in their local museum, at a sporting mega-event, as an airport ambassador, or travelling the global as a volunteer tourist. Managing Volunteers in Tourism reviews the latest research to highlight the key management issues and relate them to the tourism volunteering context. It includes previously under-researched forms of tourism volunteering such as meet-and-greeters, surf life-savers, conservation, festival, and information centre volunteers and volunTourists. The book develops through three distinct sections, the first of which begins by introducing the concept of volunteering and considering the variety of volunteer forms and settings within tourism. The next part picks up the organisational approach and examines volunteer program design and planning, volunteer motivation, recruitment and selection, training and development, reward and retention, and diversity management. The final part consists of ten case studies from leading international researchers and practitioners identifying best practice and key management challenges. Real-life examples and case studies throughout this book provide an in-depth examination of the challenges facing those managing tourism volunteers, making this book indispensible for current and future managers in the tourism industry.

The book is a landmark volume which examines perplexing tourism debates such as the relevance of mass tourism, climate change, authenticity, tourism and poverty and slow tourism. Multidisciplinary in content, it covers applied aspects of sociology, anthropology, humanities and biosciences. The book is unique in its presentation and style and will be an essential resource for scholars, academics and practitioners.

Summary: This book revisits and further develops the topics and themes covered in Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference, written over 10 years ago. Concentrating on the experience of the volunteer tourist and the host community, this new edition builds on the view of volunteer tourism as a positive and sustainable form of tourism to examine a broader spectrum of behaviours and experiences and consider critically where the volunteer tourist experience both compliments and collides with host communities, using multiple case studies. The book has nine chapters and a subject index.

This book examines the emerging phenomenon of slow tourism, addressing growing consumer concerns with quality leisure time, environmental and cultural sustainability, as well as the embodied experience of place. Drawing on a range of international case studies, the book explores how slow tourism encapsulates a range of lifestyle practices, mobilities and ethics.

Neither the tourism industry nor the tourist has responded convincingly to calls for more responsibility in tourism. Ethical consumption places pressure on travellers to manage a large number of decisions at a time when hedonic motivations threaten to override other priorities. Unsurprisingly, tensions occur and compromises are made. This book offers new insight into the motivations that influence tourists and their decision-making. It explores how consumers navigate the responsible tourism market place and provide a rich understanding of the challenges facing those seeking to encourage travellers to become responsible. Not only will the book provide an improved interpretation of the complexity of ethical consumption in tourism, but it will also offer a variety of stakeholders a deeper understanding of: the key challenges facing stakeholders in the production and consumption of responsible tourism how ethical consumers can be influenced to consume ethically the gaps in consumer knowledge and how to broaden the appeal for individuals to make more informed ethical decisions how tour operators can respond to this emerging market by innovative product development how to design informative marketing communications to encourage a greater uptake for responsible holidays how destinations can tailor their products to the ethical consumer market how destination communities and management organisations can target responsible tourists through the provision of sustainable alternatives to mass-market holiday products. Written by leading academics from all over the world, this timely and important volume will be valuable reading for ubdergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in Tourism Ethics, Ethical Consumption and the global issue of Sustainability.