Resources

RESOURCES


RESOURCES: PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Author : Kevin Lyons
School/Work Place : University of Newcastle, Australia
Contact : kkevin.lyons@newcastle.edu.au
Year : 2007

The popularity of volunteer tourism as a form of alternative tourism has grown significantly over the past decade (McGehee, and Norman, 2002). Volunteer tourists can now be found throughout the world participating in a wide array of social, educational, political and environmental projects. While these projects continue to use volunteer tourists as a significant source of labour, the NGOs and community organisations that provide and support them have begun exploring other innovative ways to attract and engage volunteer tourists who may wish to provide their voluntary labour in less direct ways. As a result programs are now emerging that move beyond the convention established in volunteer tourism where participants travel to a destination community to volunteer their labour while simultaneously being a ‘tourist’ in the broadest sense of the word. Instead, these new programs fuse adventure, volunteerism and philanthropy incrementally into an innovative tourism experience that challenges traditional debates about the decommodifying processes (Wearing, McDonald, and Ponting, 2005) embedded in volunteer tourism. One example of this new type of volunteer tourism is the development and provision of fundraising adventure tours. Fundraising adventure tourism has been adopted by a number of NGO’s who recruit participants willing to raise a pre-determined sum of money half of which is used to support the NGO’s core business and the remaining funds are used to fund an adventure tour.

Previous arguments have suggested that volunteer tourism does not fit into the commodified regime of mass and packaged tourism as its focus is not on the exchange value in the tourism system (Wearing et al. 2005). This paper explores whether the act of fundraising as an act of volunteering, conducted prior to participating in an adventure tour enabled participants to experience the decommodified frame of gift economy that has been heralded as the hallmark of volunteer tourism (Wearing, 2001) or whether this separation undermines this process. This paper presents a case study of one of these innovative programs developed and operated by Oxfam Community Aid Abroad Australia – Oxfam Challenge program.

This paper draws on the marketing materials of Oxfam and presents findings from an analysis of diaries and web-blogs of 25 individuals who participated in fundraising/cycling adventures with Oxfam Australia– Oxfam Challenge program. The adventure fundraising tour conducted by Oxfam Australia is marketed as an adventure experience with a difference. OXFAM Australia recruits participants willing to raise $5000 which in-part covers the cost of a two week cycling tour through remote villages in China, Vietnam or Cambodia where they visit environmental and humanitarian projects and where the funds they raised are being used. While participants are recruited through Oxfam Australia, the adventure tour component of the program is outsourced to a commercial travel service provider who provides a fully packaged program including airfares, meals, a bicycle, and a guide. This component of the experience is almost identical to any packaged adventurebased tour conducted by a wide range of operators globally.


List of Articles
No. Subject Viewssort Date
174 Think Tank IV It's Mostly About Me: Reasons why Volunteers contribut... file 7488 Oct 13, 2013

This paper contributes to the debate by reporting on inital findings from a wider study of volunteers in museums and art museums that was designed to empirically explore volunteer motivation, expectations, values and commitment. The aim of t...

Author: Deborah Edwards 

Year: 2004 

173 Think Tank VIII Tourism for Marginal Groups: Tourism as a Livelihood S... file 7544 Oct 13, 2013

Since the report of the Brundtland Commission was published 1987 (WCED 1987), sustainable development has been incorporated into the policies of many international organizations and the legislation of jurisdictions throughout the world. Nev...

Author: Teresa C.H. Tao & Geoffrey Wall 

Year: 2008 

172 Think Tank XI Learning Network Sustainable Tourism (LNST) for Touris... file 7580 Oct 14, 2013

Since 2002 the Flemish Tourism Board, the executive agency of the Flemish Ministry of Tourism, has implemented different actions to introduce the principles of sustainable tourism into tourism education in Flanders. The general objective is...

Author: Griet Geudens & Manuel Minne 

Year: 2011 

171 Think Tank XI Sustainable Tourism Labels: A Suitable Tool for Consum... file 7618 Oct 14, 2013

In an attempt to encourage businesses making an effort to reduce the negative impacts of tourism, and to maximise the positive outcomes of this activity an extensive number of sustainable tourism labels were developed worldwide. It has been...

Author: Sofia Reino 

Year: 2011 

170 Think Tank XIII Measuring Tourism: Developing a Regional Level Framewo... file 7651 Nov 06, 2013

In the field of tourism impacts research it is often assumed that certain characteristics of tourism are related to the nature and extent of tourism impacts on the destination’s community well-being. However, a standard set of measures for t...

Author: Elena Konovalov, Laurie Murphy & Gianna Moscardo 

Year: 2013 

169 Think Tank XIV Current Global Initiatives to Address the Sustainabili... file 7657 Jul 07, 2014

A number of ongoing and new initiatives aim at the tourism sector with the intention of improving sustainability within the sector and through tourism in other economic and social activities. Dirk's presentation reflects on UNWTO’s position ...

Author: Dirk Glaesser 

Year: 2014 

168 Think Tank XIV Exploring Policy, Politics and Governance through Stak... file 7669 Jun 27, 2014

This paper looks at the development of an ecotrekking industry on the Kokoda Track and demonstrates how the use of participatory methods in community based tourism can align two different “regimes of truth” (that of the community and of the ...

Author: Stephen Wearing, Paul Chatterton & Amy Reggers 

Year: 2014 

167 Think Tank VII Getting Fit to Innovate: TUI's InnOlympics file 7691 Oct 13, 2013

Tether (2003) describes innovation within service industries as having a Cinderella status - marginal and neglected. The traditional approach to thinking about innovation has been to concentrate on manufacturing and within that, the role of...

Author: Graham Miller & Caroline Scarles 

Year: 2007 

166 Think Tank XII Encouraging Environmentally Friendly Transport Mode Ch... file 7727 Nov 06, 2013

The travel between home and destination is a key element of any holiday and has received increasing attention by tourism scholars as its environmental and particularly its climatic impacts have become widely recognized (Gössling 2002; Metz, ...

Author: Astrid Dickinger & Anja Hergesell 

Year: 2012 

165 Think Tank V Managing Risk and Crisis for Sustainable Tourism: Rese... file 7762 Dec 14, 2013

Many tourism professionals are afraid to speak about terms such as tourism security and tourism safety. There is a common feeling among tourism and travel professionals that these terms will frighten customers and that the less said the bett...

Author: Peter E. Tarlow 

Year: 2005 

OPA: Keynote Speech 

164 Think Tank X Sustainable Destination Management and the Marketing-P... file 7764 Oct 13, 2013

A traditional and widely held view is that a sustainable approach to destination planning and management ideally requires that marketing and product development are undertaken in an integrated manner. However, if we take just two activities...

Author: Tazim Jamal & Dianne Dredge 

Year: 2010 

163 Think Tank VIII Integrating Sustainability into Tourism Education and ... file 7780 Oct 13, 2013

The focus of this paper is to provide an overview of the current sustainability content in Irish tourism programmes and the identification of key trends in this regard. It is based on extensive research of secondary and tertiary education s...

Author: Jane Stacey, Sheila Flanagan, Kevin Griffin & Anna Tottle 

Year: 2008 

162 Think Tank XIX Exploring guest book inscriptions towards understandin... file 7785 Oct 23, 2019

Key words: visitor experience, guest books, Mnemba Island Lodge, Zanzibar Page: 125-139 Exploring guest book inscriptions towards understanding tourist experience at Mnemba Island Lodge.pdf Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* S...

Author: Kevin Mearns 

Year: 2019 

161 Think Tank IX The elusiveness of sustainability in tourism: The cult... file 7804 Oct 13, 2013

Sustainable tourism is perhaps the most prominent feature of contemporary tourism discourse. However, despite its prominence for several decades, achieving sustainability remains as elusive as ever. This paper explores the concept of the cu...

Author: Freya Higgins-Desbiolles 

Year: 2009 

160 Think Tank XIV The Roles of the Public, Private and Voluntary Sector ... file 7908 Jun 26, 2014

Social tourism refers to initiatives that aim to include groups into tourism that would otherwise be excluded from it. The earliest definition of social tourism by Hunzicker (1951) described social tourism as ‘‘the relationships and phenomen...

Author: Lynn Minnaert 

Year: 2014 

159 Think Tank XII A Global Tourism Geography - The Role of Transport file 7934 Nov 06, 2013

After decades of tourism research definitions and statistics of global tourism, flows are still not uniformly defined. A problem is that scholars, sector stakeholders and policy makers tend to have a biased image of the global tourism system...

Author: Paul Peeters & Martin Landré 

Year: 2012 

158 Think Tank XII Creating Tourism Transport Flow Maps with GIS: A Pract... file 7943 Nov 06, 2013

This paper explores various options to visualize tourism transport flows with spatial analysis tools and show them on maps. To facilitate implementation of these options, procedures for data preparation and map creation are explained through...

Author: Martin Landré & Paul Peeters 

Year: 2012 

157 Think Tank IX Tourism Relationship Model and Intermediary for Sustai... file 8018 Oct 13, 2013

This paper proposes a simple model that depicts the relationship between community and extra-community stakeholders that will enable the effective development of sustainable tourism. “Sustainable tourism” in this paper is defined as tourism ...

Author: Asami Shikida, Mami Yoda, Akiko Kino & Masayuki Morishige 

Year: 2009 

156 Think Tank XIV Tourism Concessions in National Parks: Neo-liberal Too... file 8026 Jun 26, 2014

For the tourism sector the government aims to “Grow the number of new business opportunities on public conservation land in order to deliver increased economic prosperity and conservation gain” (New Zealand Government, 2012: 23). In relation...

Author: Valentina Dinica 

Year: 2014 

155 Think Tank X Implementation of the DIT-ACHIEV Model for Sustainable... file 8046 Oct 13, 2013

The DIT-ACHIEV Model is a model of sustainable tourism indicators developed in a previous research project undertaken by the School of Hospitality Management and Tourism, Dublin Institute of Technology. The indicators represent six fields o...

Author: Maeve Morrissey, Kevin Griffin & Sheila Flanagan 

Year: 2010 

AAA