Volunteer tourism impacts towards host community in developing country a case study of Batu Puteh Community Tourism Cooperative Ltd (KOPEL Bhd), Kinabatangan, Sabah

Abstract

Volunteer tourism impacts refer to the potential positive and negative impacts generated by volunteer tourist during and after volunteering in a specific host destination. As previous research merely focusing on the impacts gained by volunteer tourist and less research is done with respect to host destination perspective, this research is aimed to address the benefits gained by the host community in the context of developing country. In order to discover and understand what exactly gained by host community, this research is done by applying a case study research approach along with in-depth interview with the local representatives in one of the best volunteer tourism host destination in Kinabatangan, Sabah. Researcher has lined out several important inquiries of the research such as what are exactly gained by the host community through volunteer tourism? How much does the host community benefits from the volunteer activities? Were volunteer tourism activities creates more tangible or intangible benefits to the locals? And which of the benefits is preferred and valued more by the locals? The data collected have been analysed into three main themes which are social/ livelihood benefits, economic benefits and environmental benefits. The results of this study illustrate impacts experienced and valued by local community varied based on their acceptance of volunteer tourist, years of involvement in volunteer tourism and relationship or bonding generated with volunteer tourist. Based on the key findings, this study concludes that host community valued volunteer tourists most on the social/livelihood benefits generated by them compared to financial benefits as usually expected in other researches. Whilst, the potential negative impacts of volunteer tourism such as dependency as proven in less developed countries did not occurred in the study area due to KOPEL's proper planning and set up as tourism cooperative or as a community based tourism