Provide a 6 pages analysis while answering the following question: Impacts of Volunteer Tourism in Host Communities. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required. Alternative tourism has gained considerable popularity over the years, as more and more people are looking to do more than vacationing. Volunteer tourism is a classic example of alternative tourism. It involves traveling to further a cause, other than leisure. This essay will explore the various definitions of volunteer tourism, give its brief history, and finally highlight and evaluate its impacts, both the positive and negative, on host communities.

Volunteer tourism can be defined and looked at in a number of ways. In a strict sense, it is a form of alternative tourism, like ecotourism. In the alternative forms of tourism, people travel to accomplish other agendas in their travel itineraries other than just leisure. This could be medical research or environmental conservation (Benson, 2010:15). Volunteer travel has a wide scope and ranges from volunteering in such activities as tree planting and cleaning up of national parks, to those activities that require a high level of skill such as the development of sustainable energy for villages in foreign lands. This, however, is the general and strict version. There are other experiences in tourism, which are unique from this definition. Wearing provides a distinct definition of volunteer tourism from the strict categorization of alternative tourism. He defined volunteer tourism as an activity pursued by persons or tourists in a manner that is organized and involves such volunteer activities as alleviation of poverty in society, research, or environment restoration (Wearing & McGehee, 2013:37). He thus defined a volunteer tourist as any person who undertakes volunteer work in the cause of his or her traveling. In this definition of a volunteer tourist, only tourists undertaking short-term volunteer work are accommodated and not those who commit to volunteer work that takes more than one year.

Volunteer tourism may also be defined from the word ‘volunteerism’.&nbsp.