Since publishing Volunteer Tourism: Experiences That Make a Difference, Wearing has received constructive feedback that the first book relied heavily on a single case study and tended to emphasize the experience of volunteer tourism from the tourists’ perspective. In this book, we seek to rectify those limitations by exploring a much wider range of examples of volunteer tourism from all over the world. In addition, the title of this book reflects our attempt to focus more explicitly upon the context for the experience, and place front and centre host community issues and perspectives as a major concern of this book.
List of Tables, Boxes and Figures
Table 4.1. Additional volunteer tourism organizations.
Table 6.1. Elements of a volunteer tourism project framework.
Table 9.1. Commodified mass tourism vs decommodified alternative paradigm views.
Box 2.1. Features of alternative tourism.
Box 6.1. 2008 Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria (GSTC).
Fig. 2.1. A conceptual schema of alternative tourism.
Fig. 5.1. Primary motives for volunteer tourists.
1 Introduction
Beyond Experiences that Make a Difference
Despite the considerable growth in tourism and its many achievements, it has become clear that it has not always been able simultaneously to meet the needs of communities and those who visit them. Evidence that tourism often privileges visitors’ needs over host communities is well documented in the literature (Torres & Momset, 2005; Jamal et al., 2006; Meyer, 2007). In part, this has been attributed to a social, economic and political order that places profits ahead of people, which has dominated the globe and worsened over the past decade. The dominance of neoliberal politics, both generally and within tourism, continues to broaden the gap between wealthy and poor nations and, more broadly, between the Global North and Global South (Steinbrink, 2012). In response to this continued inequity, alternative ways of tourism development are being championed.
In addition to the obvious focus on volunteer tourism, a number of other forms of tourism will be introduced and discussed in this chapter (and throughout the book) as well, including mass tourism, sustainable tourism, ecotourism, alternative tourism and pro-poor tourism (PPT). Mass tourism refers to the mainstream, well developed and highly commodified form of tourism most commonly experienced, which involves an exchange of discretionary income for an experience that takes place away from the normal sphere of life. Sustainable tourism has received a great deal of attention (and an equal amount of controversy) and refers to tourism that is developed in a way that focuses on the long-term, economic, socio-cultural and environmental viability of a community. Ecotourism is often used interchangeably with sustainable tourism, but in fact has a stronger focus on the environmental protection of a destination. Alternative tourism emerged in the 1990s as a more radical form of sustainable tourism (Pearce, 1992). Alternative tourism sought to challenge increasingly commodified mass tourism and at the very least sidestep, but ideally disrupt, the consumptive practices that underpinned it. Finally, PPT is an approach to the industry that aims to provide opportunities for the poor. Over the past decade, volunteer tourism can trace its roots in alternative and ecotourism, but now can be found in virtually every sector and type of tourism, including mass tourism.
As a result of the growth of volunteer tourism, this book examines how volunteer tourism acts as an alternative form of tourism while struggling with its own commodification. The rise of commodified and packaged forms of volunteer tourism raises important questions about whether volunteer tourism really remains ‘alternative’. However, before addressing such critical considerations, we first turn to a discussion of the history and pedigree of volunteer tourism and the alternative ‘turn’ that we claim gave rise to it.
Historical Foundations of Alternative Tourism
Historically, the prohibitive costs, transport difficulties and perceived dangers prevented many from experiencing other countries and cultures outside of their own. From the beginning of recorded history to as late as the 18th century, leisure travel was largely the province of the privileged and even then, something that was not particularly easy. In the Middle Ages for example, a time of mass Christian pilgrimages, ‘travel was still generally considered to be a dangerous and uncomfortable experience that was best avoided if at all possible’ (Weaver & Opperman, 2000: 61).
It was the phenomenon of the ‘Grand Tour’, which became popular in the 16th century, that best represents the initial developments of international tourism (Towner, 1985). Aristocratic young men from ‘the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe undertook extended trips to continental Europe for educational and cultural purposes’ (Weaver & Opperman, 2000: 61). High social value was placed on these expeditions; however, it was here that travel motives began to shift: travelling for religious pilgrimage, education and social status slowly gave way to travelling for pleasure and sightseeing. The industrial revolution saw a growing need for recreation opportunities and, subsequently, the transport systems to allow them to occur (Goeldner & Ritchie, 2012). Following the introduction of improvements in transport such as railroads, sealed roads and even ocean liners, the nature of travel began to change rapidly. Notably, the widespread application of air travel for leisure purposes and the growing economies of scale meant that travel soon became a commodity to be sold to a growing number of potential tourists. As Hall (1995: 38) observes:
Mass tourism is generally acknowledged to have commenced on 5 July 1841, when the first conducted excursion train of Thomas Cook left Leicester station in northern Britain. Since that time tourism has developed from the almost exclusive domain of the aristocracy to an experience that is enjoyed by tens of millions worldwide.
As mass tourism advanced into the 19th century, it became more and more insulated from the real world and treated as an escape to extraordinary places, offering an experience that had little to do with the reality surrounding it (Larsen, 2008). In opposition to its origins, where travellers sought the unknown, mass tourism was fast becoming a home away from home where participants no longer had to expose themselves to the dangers of having to meet and associate with the host community, as they were now able to ‘gaze’ (Urry, 2002) from the safety and comfort of coaches, trains and hotel rooms without self-immersion into the cultural milieu surrounding them. Group sizes and frequency of excursions increased, thus giving literal weight to the term ‘mass tourism’.
Tourism has become the world’s largest industry. The 10-year annualized growth (2007–2016) forecast is 4.2% per annum. The number of international arrivals shows an evolution from a mere 25 million in 1950 to an estimated 980 million in 2011, corresponding to an average annual growth rate of 4.4%, even in the current economic environment (UNWTO, 2012). Tourism is directly responsible for 5% of the world’s GDP, 6% of total exports, and employs one out of every 12 people in advanced and emerging economies alike (UNWTO, 2012).
In accounting for tourism as a global phenomenon, much of the initial sociological work was concerned with the individual tourist and the part that vacations play in establishing identity and a sense of self. This self was predominantly posited as a universal and tourism, like leisure, was seen in an