Going global, acting local: volunteer tourists as prospective community builders

ABSTRACT

In the growing field of volunteer tourism research, studies have investigated participant motivations and the benefits accruing to both travellers and the community, as well as undertaking critical assessments of the phenomenon. Comparatively little attention has been paid to changes associated with the post-volunteer period and particularly to the likelihood of volunteer tourists making contributions within their home communities. Using the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm, this study explores the impacts of the volunteer tourism experience on the intentions of volunteer tourists to undertake other variants of volunteering post-trip. The expectations of respondents and their volunteering disconfirmations were measured over the course of travel using a two-round online survey to study the effects of these constructs on respondent intentions to volunteer in their home communities. No strong evidence was found that volunteer tourism acts as a recruitment medium for future volunteering. The research concludes by restating the unresolved question of whether the weak links between volunteer tourism and home community volunteering symptomatise the shallowness of a phenomenon that benefits the privileged or whether volunteer tourism provides a genuine mechanism for developing global citizens who think global and act local.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteer tourism
• global citizens
• cosmopolitanism
• volunteering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Faith Ong completed her PhD at Victoria University, Melbourne. Her thesis examined the impacts of volunteer tourism on behavioural intentions for other forms of volunteering. She continues research in the areas of volunteer tourism and its post-return impacts.

Brian King is a Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He specialises in tourism marketing research with an emphasis on cultural dimensions and emerging Asia-Pacific markets. He has examined the intersection between tourism and various social phenomena including migration, VFR and international education.

Leonie Lockstone-Binney is Associate Professor and an Associate Dean (Research) at William Angliss Institute, Australia. Building on her PhD study, her specialist area of research expertise relates to volunteering in event and tourism settings.

Olga Junek is a lecturer in tourism and events management at Victoria University, Australia. Her research interests include international students and their leisure and travel patterns and interests, tourism and events management education and curricula design and voluntary tourism amongst university students.

ORCID

Faith Ong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0001-4774