Volunteer Tourism but you can choose any subject relative to tourism Essay

Volunteer Tourism but you can choose any subject relative to tourism - Essay Example Some of the subjective factors are age, education, economic status, gender, etc and the objective factors are cultural, social, economic, environmental ones. Indeed a volunteer tourist’s perception of a destination is supposed to be influenced by both subjective and objective factors. An in-depth knowledge of the factors that influence the tourist demography’s perception of destinations can help both the entrepreneurs and the academicians in this sector. Rationales for the Research In current tourism discourses, ‘volunteerism’ or ‘volunteer tourism’ is a nascent idea that is related to a wide range of socioeconomic, cultural and environmental concerns. During these days, the growing individual interest in the alluring yields of alternative tourism in response to the lacks of mass tourism has drawn increasing academic as well as commercial attention to the idea of volunteer tourism. On one hand, modern tourism industry increasingly shifts its at tention from the conventional mass tourism to the volunteer tourism utilizing the consumers’ interest in unique tourism experiences and on the other hand, the frontiers of tourism industry are constantly confronted with the socioeconomic, cultural and environmental concerns while propounding an all embracive definition, of volunteer tourism, that necessarily will define its relationships with those concerns. Since the term â€Å"volunteer tourism† is more of the generalization of a tourism concept that serves as an alternative to the concept of a mass conventional tourism, it appears to be the premise for other particular tourism products such as ecotourism, cultural tourism, adventure tourism, etc that include volunteer components and authenticity of experiences more than conventional mass tourism can offer. Indeed though the tourism industry and its role as direct tourism service providers are quite adaptable with the concept of mass tourism, tourist industry and vol unteer tourism are conceptually contrastive with each other, since volunteer tourists want to â€Å"benefit from displaced self-understanding and the freedom to go beyond the limits that frontiers [of tourism industries] present† (Wearing, 2001:2). Therefore, whereas mass tourism allows the operators of tourism industries to exert control over the tourists’ activities to adhere to the socio-cultural and environmental protection protocols, to an extent that is greater than the volunteer tourism products allow the operators, since the freedom-zeal expected by the volunteer tourists is in direct contrast with such control. It seems that the tourism industry operators are thrown in endless struggle to make them more flexible and adaptable with these expectations meet the tourists’ expectations freedom to go beyond the limitation of conventional tourism industry, as Igor Ackerberg and Parkpoom Prapasawudi say, â€Å"Currently, the sector is moving toward higher comm ercialization with more profit-oriented companies offering volunteer tourism packages, making the study of volunteer tourists’ perception