Turning Sustainable Travel on Its Head

Travel and tourism is increasingly harming our planet. While some companies in the travel sector are working hard to promote sustainability,  the industry as a whole is not, including the unsustainable all-inclusive tourism model that as a whole is failing to support local communities and harms the local and global environment.  Volunteer vacations, i.e. short-term vacations with volunteer projects, are an important part of the growing sustainable travel movement that seeks to reverse the harm.  Short-term “Voluntourism” for unskilled volunteers is often criticized for creating limited benefits or even causing harm.  Current volunteer vacations fail to appeal to a broader audience owing to high costs, unattractive destinations and poor lodging.  With few exceptions, volunteer vacations worldwide are not linked to worthy nonprofit causes capable of producing measurable results.  Even the best volunteer vacations suffer from a cardinal sin: by glorifying the volunteer, they de-emphasize the role of local leaders and thus perpetuate a culture of dependency.

The BeachCorps model turns volunteer vacations and sustainable travel on its head.  BeachCorps is a new kind of volunteer vacation that uses great vacations and sustainability campaigns to support great nonprofits.  BeachCorps is the only volunteer vacation worldwide that allows you to combine the fun and relaxation of a typical beach vacation with meaningful volunteering for the best local nonprofits—not a “cause” invented to please tourists.  Our #SustainabilityPledge booking platform gives discounts for choosing sustainable lodging and educates travelers on combining fun vacations with sustainability.  We can’t “get rid” of all-inclusive resorts; they provide too many jobs and too many benefits.  But we can start to change our purchasing habits to favor more sustainable lodging and all-inclusive resorts like Chic Resorts that are strongly committed to sustainability.  

BeachCorps partners with the mainstream travel market because we must mainstream sustainability.  If we rely only on backpackers and eco-tourists to save the planet, we soon won’t have a planet to save.  BeachCorps emphasizes the power of people-to-people engagement to support nonprofit causes as opposed to the excessive emphasis on manual labor in other volunteer vacations.  For BeachCorps, the real heroes are the locals who are changing their communities.  As our motto states BeachCorps volunteer is just “a little grain of sand.”  A little sand in the wrong place can hurt, and only a lot of sand placed well can create something beautiful.

For many years, voluntourism has been vilified for being “too commercial,” though there is no evidence that nonprofit volunteer vacations are better than for-profit ones.  Ironically, the answer to fixing the underlying problems in sustainability of voluntourism is to make it more commercial and partner with the industry to promote a race to the top in sustainability. 

And that is what we plan to do.  One crazy headstand and one little grain of sand at a time.  

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