Volunteer Tourism: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

In recent years, volunteer tourism has flourished as an alternative to traditional tourism aimed at fostering reciprocity between participants and the host community. Although this led to an increasing interest among scholars, little attention has been given on identifying the current state of knowledge on volunteer tourism. This systematic literature review is designed to evaluate the academic literature on volunteer tourism in terms of the research methodology, population, geographical location, theoretical framework, and research topics. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology, this paper covers 184 articles published in Web of Science database from January 2010 to December 2021. Findings reveal that most of the research on volunteer tourism have been conducted from a qualitative approach taking volunteer tourists as study sample. Results show that previous literature on volunteer tourism have been focused on the following perspectives: studies focused on the experience of key stakeholders, studies aimed at understanding the volunteer tourism industry, studies on volunteer tourism as it relates to sustainable development, and studies focused on volunteer tourism and global citizenship. The analysis of current state of knowledge about volunteer tourism also suggests several directions for further research in this domain.