ABSTRACT
Volunteers play an integral role in the tourism industry with two of the more obvious examples being in visitor information centres and in visitor attractions. Volunteers are usually added to the workforce at visitor attractions in order to enhance the visitor experience (Wells, 1996) and, indeed, it is unlikely that many HVAs would be able to survive financially without volunteers. Despite the fact that volunteers produce enormous financial benefits for organizations, they are ‘for the most part not managed or badly managed’ (Wilson and Pimm, 1996: 24) and the management of volunteers has not yet been recognized as a major focus for theoretical investigation (Deery, Jago and Shaw, 1998).
