Negative Effects Of Volunteer Tourism

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Tourism is something that has continuously been growing at a rapid rate, providing both positive impacts as well as negative. There are so many different reasons why people decide to travel to certain destinations, and a person’s character plays a huge role in this. Certain types of tourism would include, dark tourism, adventure, culinary, and ecotourism to name a few. One type of tourism that has become increasingly popular is volunteering tourism. “Volunteer tourism, sometimes called "voluntourism," refers to the practice of spending vacation time and money traveling to a destination to perform volunteer service. While people have engaged in the practice of paying their way to help in another area for many years, the concept grew in …show more content…

If we consider first the social impacts that volunteer tourism can have on the children of destinations and the host community. We already looked at the problem of people coming and going and the effect that it can have on the children, and how the people in the community can become too dependent on volunteers and not necessarily learn the skills to further develop their community. There are certain steps that can be taken to improve the impact that volunteer tourists have and make it more sustainable. One way that these volunteers can positively contribute to the social aspect, is by spending time with the local people and teach them skills that they can use to survive and make a living. The people who run the orphanages can limit the amount of people coming and going, and only allow people who are planning to stay for a substantial amount of time to volunteer, thereby limiting the constant disruption of the children’s lives. To make the environmental impact that the volunteer tourists create more sustainable, it would be better to let the tourists spend money in the town helping out the economy and growing the small businesses, as well as helping build infrastructure free of charge. There would also be the fact that the tourists should be more aware and careful of the impact they have on the local environment. They should come to volunteer and not expect to have the same accommodations that they have at their home, they should live in the local community and partake in the local events and ways of living, by eating the same food and not wasting the communities’ recourses on extravagant luxuries. “To boost tourism huge money is invested to preserve the local heritage, to improve infrastructure, to provide better local facilities which in turn creates better education, better leisure

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