Volunteer tourism : an exploration of the potential negative impacts

Abstract EN

Volunteer tourism as an alternative to mass tourism has grown significantly since the 1980s, sparking research interest in the subject.

Existing research has focused primarily on the benefits of volunteer tourism and many studies have simply involved profiling volunteers or investigating their motivations.

However, there are numerous possible negative impacts of volunteer tourism that deserve increased attention from both researchers and project managers.

Therefore, the present paper attempts to overcome this limitation since its main purpose is to explore the potential negative impacts of volunteer tourism.

Moreover, the research aims to identify the main source of negative impacts during stages of dev^eloping the volunteer process.

In addition, this study sheds light on the negative impacts that volunteer tourism can have on host communities.

Thus, in order to achieve these goals, e-mail interviews are conducted with a representative sample of the supply side of volunteer tourism (30 experts from destinations) and a sample of the demand side (60 organizations of volunteer tourism).

The results reveal that the main possible negative impacts are represented at host communities; such impacts could be classified into cultural, environmental and economic.

This study clearly indicates that the main sources of negative impacts can happen during developing and carrying out programs.

Interestingly, the findings also illustrate that there are negative impacts resulting from the volunteer tourists' characteristics and attitudes.

Accordtagly, the results of this study would benefit organizations when developing their programs as well as host communities.