Abstract This book provides an overview of the phenomenon of volunteer tourism, its sources and its development as a concept; and focuses on the potential positive social and environmental benefits of volunteer tourism, and the prerequisites for a successful experience. Chapter 2 examines alternative tourism experiences and how tourists themselves construct them, then conceptualizes the concept of volunteer tourism within those boundaries of alternative tourism and, subsequently, mass tourism. Chapter 3 examines one of the 60 environmental projects undertaken by Youth Challenge International (YCI) between 1991 and 1995, which provides a microsocial context for the examination of the Santa Elena Rainforest Reserve experience of YCI participants. Chapter 4 presents the data obtained from the in-depth interviews with participants from Australia, over the 3 years of the Costa Rica project. Chapter 5 examines the elements of ecotourism, volunteerism and serious leisure in conjunction with the themes that emerged from the participant's definitions of the experience and links them to related information in the interviews and the literature. Chapter 6 focuses on the centrality of the natural environment. Chapter 7 explores how volunteer tourism experiences actually contribute to the development of self, framing the experience in the very words of the participants. Chapter 8 examines the growing convergence of aims between local communities and the tourism sector. Chapter 9 argues that the alternative tourism experiences should not be reduced to a dialogic model of impossible realities related to dialectal materialism. Instead, its understanding should be grounded in human interactions and the concrete social reality in which it takes place.
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