Travel to serve: Mapping the landscape of volunteer tourism scholarship

Abstract

Volunteer tourism (VT) has emerged as a significant travel niche, combining travel and service for meaningful societal impact. Despite growing global practice and increased academic discourse, the VT literature remains fragmented, lacking a structured synthesis. This study addresses the pressing need to investigate the knowledge domain, uncovering its intellectual structure, trends, and scientific advancements. The present study, through a novel integration of bibliometrics and text analytics, attempts to fill this gap. Results reveal an exponential growth of VT research since 2005, with dominant thematic clusters including motivations, experiences, youth participation, conservation efforts, and social dynamics. Topic modelling further identifies six major topics, namely, motivations, farm volunteering and experiences, child-centred volunteering, conservation volunteering, community impact, and transformative travel. By consolidating the extant research, the findings of this study provide scholars with a structured foundation for VT and offer actionable directions for further research.