Volunteering at a trip destination is said to be a new, hip thing to do. However, “voluntourism” has a history of scams, and the oddity of people spending thousands of dollars on air travel and accommodations to then put in several days volunteering at what are usually minimum wage, low skilled jobs – or doing volunteer work without appropriate skills or training (such as constructing buildings, poorly).
- Volunteer opportunities and travel – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
- “Voluntourism” is mostly scams – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
December 3, 2023, USA Today: Voluntourism: How volunteering can make your vacation more meaningful (usatoday.com)
October 14, 2025: Voluntourism Is Dead. Here’s What Replaced It (says it was mostly a scam all along)
However, the keyword for unlocking this inner transformation is authentic. Voluntourism has been criticized as problematic, compared to imperialism when the traveler drops in and exploits the host community just to make themselves feel better.
The impact of your volunteering depends on how a traveler approaches it – like the organization they choose and how it works with the community.
And another:
Juliana Colonna and Léo Parent-Jung made the trek from France to Honolulu for a conference for the Society of Social Sciences since Colonna is a PhD student. With some encouragement from the conference organizers, the couple sought ways to volunteer for their first time on the island.
….
The two spent their volunteer day differently than the high schoolers. They hiked up a trail into the northern part of the valley, which is closed to the public, where they helped clear invasive tree species with native trees that once made up the valley before European contact.
Unless you are a high skilled worker (engineer, doctor, nurse, MBA, veterinarian) delivering specific high skilled services during your “voluntourism”, these volunteer travel experiences prey upon people’s desire to do good.
In the USA Today story above, an entire team of high school volleyball players and their coaches flew from Canada to Hawaii to go to a tournament (these can be educational trips, depending on how the teachers and chaperones choose to run the trips – but the reality is, they are mostly a fun trip!)
While there, they picked up trash, cleared weeds, planted trees and so on. All nice but think about this: That trip cost low thousands of $s (C) for each participant, including air travel, hotel, food and other expenses. Thus, it costs thousands of $s to deliver several hours of minimum wage services to the non-profits – no doubt the non-profit appreciated that. But it’s not a cost-effective way to deliver low wage, low skilled services.
See my two previous posts, linked above, for more on this topic. Voluntourism sounds great – in theory – but programs range from virtue signaling to scams (see the links). There are exceptions but sadly, not so many.
Afterward: I have done many volunteer activities over many decades, including Red Cross Disaster Services, volunteer Emergency Communications including at wildfires, assisting at public events (running races, parades, cycling events), volunteer firefighter, volunteer search and rescue, and ten years as a FIRST Robotics Engineering mentor. A key observation: it is hard for volunteers to find skilled volunteer opportunities and many volunteer in low or no-skilled positions. The typical example is working a food line at a shelter – nice to do but we end up with highly skilled individuals doing minimum wage level work. It may feel good but it would be more effective for a high skilled, high wage individual to work their regular job and donate a portion of their pay to the organization. Think about it!