From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words #725, 2/26/11:
HARDLY A HOLIDAY? People who travel to another country for some purpose other than simple business or pleasure have led to writers generating terms [N + N compounds] for them, whose second element is “tourism”. Among examples that have appeared in recent times are “health tourism” (travelling to another country to get cheaper medical treatment), “disaster tourism” (visiting the location of a calamity), “sex tourism” (obvious enough), even “wedding tourism” (getting married in another country). The dire financial state of Ireland is leading businessmen to spend time in the UK in order to qualify to take advantage of its much more lenient bankruptcy laws. It has become known as BANKRUPTCY TOURISM.
And then there’s volunteer tourism, portmanteau’d to voluntourism, as on the VolunTourism.org site. From the Wikipedia page as of this morning:
Volunteer travel, volunteer vacations or voluntourism is travel which includes volunteering for a charitable cause. In recent years, “bite-sized” volunteer vacations have grown in popularity. The types of volunteer vacations are diverse, from low-skill work cleaning up local wildlife areas to providing high-skill medical aid in a foreign country. Volunteer vacations participants are diverse but typically share a desire to “do something good” while also experiencing new places and challenges in locales they might not otherwise visit.
Many ghits.
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