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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 Views Datesort
7 Think Tank IV Impediments to Sustainable Service Quality in Luxury H... file 15876 Oct 13, 2013

In order for tourism to be sustainable in the long term, there must be continued viability of tourism related entities (Tesone 2004), that is business operations must be sustainable. Hotels are major tourism entities and play an important ro...

Author: Rayka Presbury 

Year: 2004 

6 Think Tank V Tourism in Small Communities: Risks and Benefits file 3449 Oct 13, 2013

This paper presents the findings from a Sustainable Tourism Co-operative Research Centre study into the risks associated with the social impacts of tourism on a small community in the Australian state of Tasmania. This state is known for its...

Author: Leo Jago, Margaret Deery & Liz Fredline 

Year: 2005 

5 Think Tank VI Service Learning in Tourism Educational Programs – A S... file 4228 Oct 13, 2013

A problem in developing new tourism markets remains how to resource them from an existing employment base. Key questions arising are: Do current tourism enterprises have the existing skills to move into these new markets for sustainable tour...

Author: Susan Anita Briggs 

Year: 2006 

» Think Tank VII Innovations in Volunteer Tourism: A Case Study of Fund... file 5309 Oct 13, 2013

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, ...

Author: Kevin Lyons 

Year: 2007 

3 Think Tank VIII Tourism-led Amenity Migration and the Transformation o... file 3321 Oct 13, 2013

Global economic and political change has stimulated an explosion in tourism-led migration flows resulting in unprecedented transformation in the form and condition of impacted communities (Woods, 2006). This increase in human migration to ar...

Author: Alison M. Gill 

Year: 2008 

2 Think Tank VIII Employment of the Disabled Workforce in the Hospitalit... file 9145 Oct 13, 2013

Employment is one of the important requirements for the integration of disabled people to daily life. The tourism industry is one of Turkey’s important industries with a great potential for growth. However this growth must be a planned and ...

Author: Sabah Balta & Murat Bengisu 

Year: 2008 

1 Think Tank IX The role of values in sustaining the hospitality labou... file 6517 Oct 13, 2013

The role of human resources in sustaining hospitality enterprises has long been recognized (Hjalager und Andersen 2001; Baum 2007). Personnel are considered vital for the delivery of touristic experiences, thus being a central ingredient of ...

Author: Anja Hergesell, Ulrike Bauernfeind & Dagmar Lund-Durlacher 

Year: 2009 

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