Voluntourism: An academic proposal for sustainability in tourism and digital technologies

Abstract

Voluntary tourism (voluntourism) is an experience that combines travelling and social aide at the destination, organized in a way that allows travelers to work on activities that would help the local population. It takes into consideration volunteers’ capabilities and the host population’s specific needs, in a form of sustainable tourism that emphasizes in the development of local culture, with a quick expansion in the Southern hemisphere. In this paper it is argued that this way of travelling allows to counteract the effects of some technologies that propose themselves as substitutes from the direct experience of traditional tourism. Voluntourism, on the other hand, offers pedagogical experiences strongly based on technology as an asset to fill in the blanks posed by distance and unequal resources. Through the observation and follow up of voluntourism experiences in Lima, Peru, in which university students from the Northern hemisphere took part, we analyze the impact on all the actors involved, and we state that, carefully guided, voluntourism can become a model for help, intervention, and dialogue, in order to implement infrastructure and technology in vulnerable settlements.