“I am 100% convinced that everyone should do this once” - An analysis of the relationship between volunteer tourism marketing and the experiences of volunteer tourists in developing countries.

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2019-08-29
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en
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Within the volunteer tourism industry, volunteer work is often put forward as an opportunity to ‘make a difference’ and as an activity that leads to intercultural understanding. However, more and more voluntourism has been criticized for its potential negative effects. A great body of academic literature argues that young unexperienced volunteers lack the skills to produce effective help and that the intercultural benefits are overstated because voluntourism might actually reinforce stereotypes about the ‘other’. Instead of addressing these negative outcomes of voluntourism, this paper explores how volunteers themselves experience their volunteer work, which is an area of research that has received little attention so far. The purpose of this paper has been to investigate the ways in which the experiences of volunteer tourists reflect the positive language provided by marketing of the different volunteering organisations, and especially in what ways they diverge.
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