Volunteer Tourism as a Sustainable Form of Tourism—The Case of Organized Events

Abstract

This paper focuses on volunteer tourism as a sustainable form of tourism relating to the volunteer service at a tourism destination and specific tourism activities. The aim of the paper is to explore volunteer tourism in Slovakia with examples of organized events, especially to search exactly how event's organizers support the development of domestic and inbound volunteer tourism in Slovakia. This paper is based on a sociological survey. We addressed 653 heterogeneous event's organizers in Slovakia. 18% of them participated in the questionnaire survey. The collected data were processed by selected mathematical and statistical methods in SPSS statistics program. As such, we found most events organizers team up with volunteers. Only half of the organizers cooperate with local volunteers, while the second half also support the development of volunteer tourism engaging in voluntourism. In the case of attractive events, the engagement of voluntourists could be more effective. The current situation has resulted from missing information about the management of volunteers but it could be improved through an e-manual for event organizers providing an outline guide for volunteer management.

Effect of Communication Practices on Volunteer Organization Identification and Retention

“…Managers should follow the model suggested by Marimon et al [57] by showing volunteers that they are personally engaged in the mission, help volunteers understand how the mission is important in fulfilling their contributions to society, make sure that volunteers understand the mission thoroughly, aid volunteers in understanding how colleagues are engaged with the mission, and allow volunteers to help update the mission over time. As one of the main motivations of volunteers is to perform activities important for society [1,[5][6][7], they should be very receptive to such actions on the part of managers.…”

“…In the future, it would be advantageous to implement the survey using additional nonprofit organizations. It would also be particularly important to test the hypotheses in organizations devoted to sustainable initiatives, as numerous studies have evaluated volunteers in these entities [5][6][7]. Another limitation is that we did not evaluate different types of supervisor/supervisee relationships [58].…”

“…Volunteering builds people's capacity, social inclusion, and responsiveness to societal initiatives [4]. In addition, volunteers play an important role in initiatives to promote sustainability, or development which fulfils the needs of the present generation without hurting needs of future ones [5][6][7]. Given the prevalence and value of volunteering, understanding volunteer dynamics has accordingly become more critical.…”

Increasing tourism through social entrepreneurship – the case of Croatia

“…Voluntourism can be considered as an integrated organized combination of volunteer service at tourist destination and specific tourism activities, which are performed in one's spare time, out of a place of residence, in home country or abroad and that is beneficial not only for voluntourists, but also for local communities and the environment (Pompurová et al, 2018). The volunteer tourist pays for the costs of his travel and stay in the destination and moreover the fee for the opportunity to be Volunteering also provides new opportunities for tourism companies.…”

“…Conducted research in the field of voluntourism mostly investigate environmental, humanitarian and development projects in less developed countries, whose cultures are significantly different from voluntourists' cultures. However, the perception of voluntourism as a combination of travel and volunteering only in developing countries is short-sighted and too simplistic owing to the diverse array of opportunities available in today's market(Pompurová et al, 2018). Voluntourism projects in developed countries are becoming more and more popular.…”