education and social status slowly gave way to travelling for pleasure and sightseeing. The industrial revolution saw a growing need for recreation opportunities and, subsequently, the transport systems to allow them to occur (Goeldner & Ritchie, 2012). Following the introduction of improvements in transport such as railroads, sealed roads and even ocean liners, the nature of travel began to change rapidly. Notably, the widespread application of air travel for leisure purposes and the growing economies of scale meant that travel soon became a commodity to be sold to a growing number of potential tourists. As Hall (1995: 38) observes:
Mass tourism is generally acknowledged to have commenced on 5 July 1841, when the first conducted excursion train of Thomas Cook left Leicester station in northern Britain. Since that time tourism has developed from the almost exclusive domain of the aristocracy to an experience that is enjoyed by tens of millions worldwide.
As mass tourism advanced into the 19th century, it became more and more insulated from the real world and treated as an escape to extraordinary places, offering an experience that had little to do with the reality surrounding it (Larsen, 2008). In opposition to its origins, where travellers sought the unknown, mass tourism was fast becoming a home away from home where participants no longer had to expose themselves to the dangers of having to meet and associate with the host community, as they were now able to ‘gaze’ (Urry, 2002) from the safety and comfort of coaches, trains and hotel rooms without self-immersion into the cultural milieu surrounding them. Group sizes and frequency of excursions increased, thus giving literal weight to the term ‘mass tourism’.
Tourism has become the world’s largest industry. The 10-year annualized growth (2007–2016) forecast is 4.2% per annum. The number of international arrivals shows an evolution from a mere 25 million in 1950 to an estimated 980 million in 2011, corresponding to an average annual growth rate of 4.4%, even in the current economic environment (UNWTO, 2012). Tourism is directly responsible for 5% of the world’s GDP, 6% of total exports, and employs one out of every 12 people in advanced and emerging economies alike (UNWTO, 2012).
In accounting for tourism as a global phenomenon, much of the initial sociological work was concerned with the individual tourist and the part that vacations play in establishing identity and a sense of self. This self was predominantly posited as a universal and tourism, like leisure, was seen in an opposing relationship with the ‘workaday world’. Cohen and Taylor (1976), for example, drew on Goffman’s (1974) concern with the presentation of self in everyday life, to argue that holidays are culturally sanctioned escape routes for Western travellers. One of the problems for the modern traveller, in this view, is to establish an identity and a sense of personal individuality in the face of the morally void forces of a technological world. Holidays provide a free area, a mental and physical escape from the immediacy of the multiplicity of impinging pressures in technological society. Thus, holidays provide scope for the nurture and cultivation of human identity; as Cohen and Taylor (1976) argue, overseas holidays are structurally similar to leisure because one of their chief purposes is identity (re)establishment and the cultivation of one’s self-consciousness. The tourist, they claim, uses all aspects of the holiday for the manipulation of well-being.
However, in the tourist literature, these arguments became diverted into a debate about the authenticity or otherwise of this experience (e.g. MacCannell, 1976; Cohen, 1987), serving to focus attention on the attractions of the tourist destination. Such a shift objectified the destination as place — a specific geographical site was presented to the tourist for their gaze (Urry, 2002). Thus the manner of presentation became all important and its authenticity or otherwise the focus of analysis: ‘It will also be suggested that objects of the tourist gaze can be effectively classified in terms of three key dichotomies, of which the romantic/collective is one (others are authentic/inauthentic and historical/modern)’, says Urry (2002: 75). The tourists themselves became synonymous with the Baudelarian flaneur (French for ‘gazer’: ‘the strolling flaneur was a forerunner of the 20th century tourist’) (Urry, 2002: 127). This flaneur was generally perceived as escaping from the workaday world for an ‘ephemeral’, ‘fugitive’ and ‘contingent’ leisure experience (e.g. Rojek, 1993: 216).
Similarly to the way in which this type of ‘flanerie’ (Urry, 2002: 135) characterized tourism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, alternative tourism has characterized the latter part of the 20th century. Tourists began searching for new and exciting forms of travel in defiance of the mass-produced tourism product borne out of the industrial revolution and, prior to that, the need for social standing (Weaver & Opperman, 2000; Hall, 2007). Backpacking, adventure tourism and ecotourism are some of the types of alternative tourism that emerged during this time and have since confirmed, via their popularity, their place as targeted market segments. The convergence of these forms of tourism, their appeal to young travellers and the advent of the internet created an alternative tourism perfect storm. Niche markets were developed that allowed the tourist to choose the holiday they felt best suited their needs and wants, while at the same time maintaining an appropriate level of social status among their peers.
Within the literature, the provision of alternative tourism is fundamentally aligned to social and environmental sustainability. Factors such as impacts upon the cultural traditions of the host community (the community associated with the destination area), biodiversity and environmental degradation dominate such literature in the late 1990s and early 21st century (e.g. World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987; Cronin, 1990; Ecologically Sustainable Development Working Groups, 1991; Richards & Hall, 2000; Sofield, 2003; Weaver, 2006).
The question of sustainability — and sustainable development by implication — in relation to alternative forms of tourism experiences has become central in the analysis and provision of these types of experiences. The World Conservation Strategy initially posited sustainability as an underlying premise for a large number of projects based in developing countries, and Our Common Future (widely known as the Brundtland Report) attempted to give it an operational context (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987; De la Court, 1990; Farrell & Runyan, 1991; Hare, 1991), which enabled agencies to engender it into their operating philosophies. For the past decade, global sustainable development has been promoted by the 2000 United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals of which tourism was identified as an important contributing industry (Ruhanen et al., 2007).
Alternative tourism has developed into a significant area of tourism experience research (Holden, 1984; Cohen, 1987; Vir Sigh et al., 1989; Pleumarom, 1990; Weiler & Hall, 1992; Smith & Eadington, 1997; Conway & Timms, 2010; Isaac, 2010; Pegg et al., 2012). However, it is important to note that a number of authors (R.W. Butler, 1990; Cohen, 1995; Wheeller, 2003; Weaver, 2011) have incorporated alternative tourism into the analysis of ‘mass tourism’, thus subordinating it to mainstream tourism research. Questions thus arise as to the feasibility of alternative tourism being differentiated as a separate construct or different paradigm. This has been a problem historically within new and emergent areas of research, as explained in the case of feminist research by Stanley and Wise (1984). Later in this book we explore whether volunteer tourism, like other forms of alternative tourism, is showing signs of being co-opted into the dominant capitalist paradigm of mass tourism that celebrates the tourist as consumer rather than as co-producer of sustainable living. However, before such a critique can be fully considered, it is first necessary to look at the manifestation of volunteer tourism as it has arisen as part of the alternative tourism movement.
Volunteer Tourism as the Ultimate Alternative Tourism?
When scholars first turned their attention to early volunteer tourism in the late 1990s, it was not well understood. Necessarily, this early scholarship, including Wearing’s (2001) and McGehee’s (2002) work, was narrowly focussed upon the relatively few existing volunteer tourism projects in operation at that time. In short, early work positioned volunteer tourism as a possibility for the future, and the future is now. Alternative forms of tourism
