48 VOLUNTEERS AND TOURISM – Contributions by Kirsten Holmes
48 VOLUNTEERS AND TOURISM – Contributions by Kirsten Holmes
My contributions to tourism research have been primarily about giving a voice to the enormous number of volunteers who are involved in tourism globally. I have more recently worked in the events and festivals space, examining event sustainability, event life cycles and event legacies. However, my work on volunteering within tourism dates to my Masters’ thesis, when I documented how a group of volunteers worked with the local council to turn a landmark – Shirley Windmill (https://www.shirleywindmill.org.uk/) near London in the UK – into a tourism attraction. I have had a soft spot for windmills ever since but my passion is about giving a voice to volunteers.
Why is volunteering within tourism important?
The tourism sector involves a wide range of individuals and groups as volunteers. I am including volunteer tourism here as a sub-sector but not a focus. Volunteer tourism – since being delineated by Stephen Wearing (2001) – has become a very popular topic for researchers but unfortunately most of these studies research are siloed within tourism studies. There is a substantial body of ‘volunteer tourism’ research within the not for profit literature more broadly. A key distinction is that outside of tourism, the focus is on international volunteers – people who travel to volunteer, but are not primarily tourists. These are typically longer term volunteers involved in development projects and are often skilled (Devereux & Holmes, 2018). This contrasts with the shorter term, unskilled volunteer tourism packages that are targeted at a typically young market (Holmes, 2014a).
The role of volunteers in providing tourism experiences for others rarely receives attention from researchers. Perhaps this is because these people often get involved in volunteer activities as an extension of their work and are therefore not perceived as volunteers either by themselves or others? Within this category we can include all of the unpaid board members of tourism associations and enterprises. These volunteers are typically people either working in tourism already or who are keen to promote their home town. They organise membership associations for tourism businesses; they establish networks to support each other in their careers, such as the Women in Tourism network; they establish new, communal business opportunities such as farmers markets. In regional areas, must tourism activity relies on these individuals and their groups. As such it is surprising how little research attention is given to these individuals (Alonso & Liu, 2013).
The other category of volunteers are those who directly interact with tourists through meet and greet programs, as tour guides, campground hosts or emergency services within the destination. These are operational volunteers. My work with colleagues Karen Smith and Leonie Lockstone-Binney among others has highlighted the wide range of operational activities that involve volunteers. We