Towards an Understanding of the Drivers of Commercialization in the Volunteer Tourism Sector

Abstract

Well-meaning volunteer tourism organizations, involving international volunteers in local community and environmental development projects, have been increasingly criticized for increasingly commercialized business models. This conceptual paper reviews important organizational drivers that influence the commercialization of the volunteer tourism sector. It posits a number of predictive measures based upon the internal and external drivers that will determine a volunteer tourism organization's position along a philanthropic-commercial continuum. It achieves this by building on lessons from the broader nonprofit sector, including research in social entrepreneurship. It also suggests topics for further research based upon this literature and current knowledge gaps within volunteer tourism. Further research in this area will assist organizations engaged in, or considering, volunteer tourism to think pragmatically about issues of commercialization within this sector ..

Volunteer Tourism and Intercultural Sensitivity: The Role of Interaction with Host Communities

“…The topics addressed include the types and roles of volunteer tourism organizations (Benson & Henderson, 2011), the role of facilitating staff (Coghlan, 2008), and the importance of psychological contract in managing volunteer tourism (Blackman & Benson, 2010). More recently, scholars have begun exploring the role of these organizations in commodification (Cousins, Evans, & Sadler, 2009) and commercionalization of volunteer tourism (Coghlan & Noakes, 2012;Tomazos & Cooper, 2012). Focusing on the role of organizations in developing cross-cultural understanding, Raymond and Hall (2008) urge these entities to take on an active role in facilitating meaningful interactions between volunteers and host communities.…”

More harm than good? The questionable ethics of medical volunteering and international student placements

“…NGOs work on the basis of their respective political or ideological objectives and need to examine carefully how these influence their approach to the provision of medical volunteering opportunities. Increasingly, NGOs are forced to commercialise in the highly competitive international volunteering market [ 46 , 47 ] to the point, as one example from Guatemala shows, that an NGO which pays northern doctors US$ 500 per surgery is so popular that it needs to search the country for patients to meet the interest [ 48 ]. For-profit organisations, i.e.…”

A conceptual framework to understand academic student volunteerism

“…A second category of international volunteer tourists are commercial volunteers (Coghlan & Noakes, 2012, Guttentag, 2012, Guttentag, 2009, those that pay an agent to arrange a volunteering holiday. The agent in this case may be drawn from a wide range of organisations, such as private companies, not-for-profit organisations, charities, and universities, and themselves have a wide range of motivates (Guttentag, 2009).…”

“…As emphasised by McGehee (2014, p. 847), 'Volunteer tourism activities have expanded from a few little-known and primarily nongovernmental organizations to a multitude of entities across the whole spectrum of enterprise forms from full nonprofits to openly for-profit ventures'. Nowadays, volunteer tourism projects are primarily promoted by commercial for-profit business firms based in a developed country rather than a developing country where most of the volunteering occurs (Coghlan & Noakes, 2012). The emphasis in these activities lies in on both volunteering and vacation, because of the additional costs that are made above a standard vacation, and therefore the volunteers themselves tend to have more altruistic motivations than the touristic volunteers.…”