Volunteer Travel Insights by GeckoGo

• Volunteer vacationers help out at home too
  A large number of people who volunteer abroad have also volunteered in their home country (60%), with another 33% interested in volunteering who haven't yet found the right opportunity
• Females volunteer more than men
  Sixty-four percent (64%) of females are currently volunteering or have volunteered before, compared to only 51% of males.
• Motivations for volunteering are altruistic
  Travelers looking to volunteer abroad want to be useful (most important to 38%) and have a personal learning experience (most important to 21%), while convenience is surprisingly not important to 48% of the respondents. In terms of activities, 62% of respondents cited they wanted to do humanitarian work, 56% wanted to do conservation and teaching, followed by community development at 53% and building at 28%.
• Volunteers stay abroad a while
  For those that have volunteered abroad, the duration of their trip tended to be longer than expected, with 51% of respondents going on a trip for more than one month and 76% traveling for at least two weeks.
• Volunteer solo
  The majority of travelers went on their trip alone (57%), 31% traveled with friends (or church groups), and only 9% traveled with a relationship partner.
• Volunteers find their trips meaningful
  Seventy-seven percent (77%) of respondents believed that their trip was very meaningful, 22% found it was meaningful, and less than 1% felt that their trip was not meaningful in any way. A constant battle in the voluntourism field is to effectively manage expectations of the volunteer -- the fact that almost 100% of respondents found their experience meaningful in some way shows a major victory for the field.
• Volunteer programs are not too commercial
  On the subject of commercialization, 29% of respondents found that voluntourism has become too commercialized, 23% thought that it should be more commercialized, and 48% thought the level of commercialization was just enough. The reasons volunteers cited for wanting more commercialization were related to the ability to recruit more volunteers to go abroad and potentially reducing costs.

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