Volunteer tourism: its role in creating conservation awareness

Abstract

This paper explores the perceptions of the impact that volunteer tourism has on the conservation awareness of non-volunteer tourists at the Elephant Nature Park (ENP) in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The ENP is a privately owned sanctuary that rehabilitates injured and abused elephants and relies on tourism and volunteer tourism for its upkeep. Data for this study were obtained through the use of self-administered questionnaires administered to 200 participants during both their pre-visit and post-visit at the ENP. Results showed that after spending time at the park, visitors' awareness about volunteer tourism increased. Participants felt that volunteer tourism increases awareness about conservation issues and volunteering, makes a considerable contribution to conservation, and brings necessary funding to conservation projects. Furthermore, non-volunteer tourists also expressed an interest in volunteering at the ENP, volunteering at home, and donating money to animal conservation organisations. The model of volunteer tourism utilised by the ENP was thus shown to be an effective tool for creating awareness about domestic elephant conservation issues in non-volunteer tourists.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.