What is it about?

A follow-up paper to "Volunteer tourism, greenwashing and understanding responsible marketing using market signalling theory" -Smith & Font, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2014. This paper examines whether volunteer tourism organisations are prepared to learn from feedback on the quality of their responsibility communications, and consider whether analysis and communication of results can influence market improvement over the 2 years between website content analysis.

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Why is it important?

The paper applies sustainability marketing literature to explain the changes in responsibility communication performance using an innovative tool to benchmark and audit responsibility in online marketing content and providing insight into how best practice marketing necessitates responsible operations. The authors report mixed results on how communicating results has encouraged change and industry improvement in responsibility, based on previous research that showed responsibility to be communicated inconsistently at best, potentially greenwashing at worst, across organisations, product types and responsible values.

Perspectives

It was fascinating to see how volunteer tourism organisations reacted to the data, analysis, private reports and public publication of the first report. Those responsible responded responsibly, discussed, wanted to learn more and implemented change. Others responded through damage limitation PR exercises. Those who showed no responsibility in the analysis and results indeed did not respond at all. The organisation shown as the least responsible through the data analysis responded through threat of litigation to publication - indeed, not very responsible to bettering the sector at all.

Ms Victoria Louise Smith
Leeds Beckett University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Marketing and communication of responsibility in volunteer tourism, Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, April 2015, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/whatt-12-2014-0050.
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