The popularity of volunteer tourism has increased since the 1990s, as have empirical studies and academic debates on the topic. Despite the broad topics covered – such as volunteers’ motivations, impacts on the local community, and the role of the sending organisations – approaches based on gender differences and feminism are still uncommon among critical tourism studies. Through a semi-systematic literature review, a variety of topics emerged, such as the gendered reproduction of colonial dynamics in voluntourism; volunteer tourists’ motivations, preferences and differences according to gender; and the expectations around traditional gender roles faced by volunteers, the local community and the sending organisations. This paper proposes a feminist research agenda where knowledge gaps and future lines of investigation are illustrated. Finally, feminist standpoint theory and its implications are discussed to offer a more in-depth exploration of the transformation of gender relationships in voluntourism experiences.

This article aims to use the applied ethics perspective to reflect on the ethical complexities that may appear in the context of volunteer tourism. In this tourist typology, volunteers come into contact with the local culture by establishing a dialogue between their motivations (diverse and not always markedly altruistic) and the morals and needs of the host community. In this dialogue, difficulties arise that may put these volunteer projects at risk since interactions between people with different values and morals can generate distrust, frustration, and even open conflicts between the host community and visitors. In this context, this article exposes and applies ethics concepts to specific cases and reaffirms the need to train volunteers before their trips to encourage critical self-reflection on their behaviour when they are in societies with a different system of morality.

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