Social impact of volunteer tourism towards host community in Perhentian Island, Terengganu

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 aim to suggest an approach to overcome the negative impact derived from the volunteer tourism in the study area. In order to discover and understand the exact positive and negative impacts towards the host community, this research applied a mixed- method research. Researcher has outlined three important inquiries of the research such as what are the positive social impacts created by volunteer tourism towards the host community? What are the negative social impacts created by volunteer tourism towards the host community? And how to minimize the negative social impact towards host community affected from the volunteerism activities? The results of this study illustrated the impacts experienced and valued by local community based on their involvement. Based on the key findings, this study concludes that host community agree that volunteer tourism create more positive cultural interaction between volunteer and host community. Meanwhile, the potential negative impacts of volunteer tourism in the study area were not too much affected due to the willingness of the host community to received volunteers. However, among the negative impacts identified were bad cultural influence; dignity degraded; negative perception; prefered volunteer tourist’ interest; dissatisfied outcome; affected the carrying capacity; and dependency.