Ethical Tourism

Ethical Tourism & Human Rights: The People Behind the Trip

By Steven Keen

MSc Responsible Tourism Management (in progress), GSTC- and ICRT-certified

15 min read Updated on Sources verified on

Every trip is carried by people: the housekeeper on a split shift, the guide on a seasonal contract, the family whose village is the “authentic experience.” This page follows the trip to the people inside it—including the children the industry should never have touched.

Key Takeaways

  • Tourism employs one in ten workers on Earth—in a sector the ILO characterizes by low wages, informality, and weak protection. Every booking chooses which employer wins.
  • The orphanage paradox: about 80% of children in orphanages have a living parent. Visitor demand creates the supply—the kindest travelers end up funding family separation.
  • Never visit or volunteer at an orphanage. The UN General Assembly named the harm in 2019; redirect the same money to organizations that reunite families.
  • Consent is the test everywhere—the worker’s, the family’s, the photographed stranger’s. If it cannot be refused, it is not consent.

The People Who Carry Your Trip

Tourism supports 366 million jobs—more than one in ten on Earth.1 More than half of those workers are women, who earn 14.7% less than the men working beside them.2 And the sector they work in is, in the ILO’s own characterization, marked by low wages, variable and long working hours, widespread informality, limited access to social protection, and gender-based discrimination.3 None of this appears in a brochure, because the entire product is designed around a single illusion: that the welcome is effortless.

The welcome is work. The seamless airport transfer is a driver’s fourteenth hour; the spotless room at a bargain rate is a housekeeper paid per room, not per hour; the “friendly locals” of the marketing copy are people doing emotional labor on a seasonal contract. Ethical tourism begins with a change of focus—from what the trip does for you to what it does to the people holding it up.

The test of a trip is not the view from the balcony. It is the payslip of the person who cleaned it.

Most of this page is about adults who can, at least in principle, negotiate, organize, and quit. But the sharpest human-rights failure in tourism involves people who can do none of those things—and it hides inside the industry’s most innocent-looking product. That is where we have to start.

The Orphanage Paradox

Here is the most counterintuitive fact in ethical tourism, and one of the most consequential: about 80% of the children living in the world’s orphanages have a living parent.4 An estimated 5.4 million children are in institutions4 5—most of them not because they lost their families, but because a system found it profitable to separate them. And one of that system’s revenue streams is the well-meaning visitor.

The mechanism is not hidden because it is complicated. It is hidden because no one who benefits from it wants you to walk it backward. So walk it backward:

The demand doesn’t help the orphans. It creates them. Follow the money below.

One good intention · five steps

It feels like help.

You have two weeks, a plane ticket, and the best of motives. An orphanage nearby welcomes volunteers—homework help, games, mealtimes. The children seem glad you came. Nothing you were told is exactly false. Follow the money anyway—one step at a time, from your good intention to where it actually lands.

This system is built to attract the kindest people in travel—and to make sure they never see how it works.

Step 1 of 5 · The Fee

Your visit came with a price tag.

Volunteer placements at orphanages are sold—by agencies at home and operators on the ground—for fees that commonly run to hundreds of dollars a week. The money feels like a donation. Structurally, it is revenue: it arrives only while there are “orphans” to visit, and it stops the day there are none.

Money that arrives only while children are on display is not a donation. It is a business model.

Step 2 of 5 · The Business

The beds became an asset.

Where visitors go, institutions multiply. In Cambodia—the best-documented case—residential care institutions proliferated through tourism’s boom years even as the number of actual orphans declined, and UNICEF found that more than 80% of the children inside had at least one living parent. The institutions were not tracking orphanhood. They were tracking demand.

Orphanages grow where tourists go—not where orphans are.

Step 3 of 5 · The Incentive

Full beds, full bookings.

An orphanage financed by visitors needs children the way a hotel needs guests: an empty bed is lost revenue. So the institution recruits. And recruiting is easiest where families are poorest—which is why the supply chain runs outward from the tourist trail into the villages around it.

The question is no longer “who will care for the orphans?” It is “where will we find the children?”

Step 4 of 5 · The Recruitment

A promise knocks on a poor family’s door.

Recruiters offer what a desperate parent cannot refuse: schooling, meals, a safer life in town. The paperwork that follows can turn a loved child into a “paper orphan”—documented as parentless while both parents wait at home. Australia was the first country to recognize this pipeline, orphanage trafficking, as a form of modern slavery.

“Paper orphan”: a child whose parents are alive, and whose orphanhood was manufactured by paperwork.

Step 5 of 5 · The Child

Now trace it back to the beginning.

An estimated 5.4 million children live in institutions worldwide—and about 80% of them have a living parent. Six decades of research is unambiguous about what institutions do to the children they hold: delays in growth, brain development, cognition, and attention—deepest for the youngest, worse the longer the stay. In 2019 the UN General Assembly said it plainly, calling on states to prevent “the harms related to volunteering programmes in orphanages, including in the context of tourism, which can lead to trafficking and exploitation.”

What helps instead: organizations that reunite families and fund community-based care—support that empties institutions rather than filling them.

The Orphanage Paradox—one good intention, followed to where it lands. Source(s): Lumos; Desmond et al., The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (2020); UNICEF Cambodia; Lancet Group Commission (2020); UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/74/133 (2019); Parliament of Australia (2017). Fee ranges reflect the orphanage-tourism research literature.
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Once the trail is walked, the conclusion is not a matter of opinion. Six decades of research—308 studies, 68 countries, more than 100,000 children—link institutional care to delays in physical growth, brain development, cognition, and attention, deepest for the youngest children and worse the longer they stay.6 Cambodia, the best-documented case, watched institutions multiply through tourism’s boom years even as actual orphanhood declined.7 The orphanage the visitor funds is not a refuge from tragedy. In the places tourists go, it is very often the tragedy itself.

“Despite the best of intentions, the sad truth is that visiting and volunteering in orphanages drives an industry that separates children from their families and puts them at risk of neglect and abuse.”

—J.K. Rowling, founder of Lumos, launching the #HelpingNotHelping campaign, October 24, 20198

After this page, an orphanage on an itinerary can never again read as kindness. The demand didn’t help the orphans. It created them.

Children Are Not Attractions

The orphanage is the sharpest case of a wider rule. School drop-ins that interrupt lessons so visitors can “see the classroom”; township and slum tours that pause for photos with other people’s children; “cultural performances” danced by minors for tips—each runs on the same logic: a child’s presence sold as an experience. The test travels well: if it would not be allowed at home, it is not kindness abroad. No school in your own city would let a stranger off a bus hug its students. The fact that a poorer school somewhere else will—because the visit comes with a donation—is not hospitality. It is leverage.

Where the industry has faced this honestly, it has produced real machinery. The Code—developed with ECPAT International—commits travel companies to six auditable criteria against the sexual exploitation of children, from staff training to reporting channels.9 A signature is not a halo, but it is a checkable fact, and its absence is a checkable fact too. The same discipline belongs in every traveler’s hands: no photographs of children without a parent’s freely given permission, no gifts or money to children directly (it finances keeping them on display), and no exceptions for institutions with moving websites.

  • The itinerary test: any stop whose draw is children—orphanage, school, “children’s home”—comes off the itinerary, full stop.
  • The camera test: a child in your photo needs what a child at home would need—a parent’s yes, freely given, with the power to say no.
  • The money test: help flows to systems that keep families together—never to the display of children that separation produces.

None of this is abstract. On Lake Volta in Ghana, the same logic runs all the way to the bottom: the ILO has long estimated some 20,000 children in forced labor in the lake’s fishing industry10—a story the author of this resource filmed from the inside for the documentary Fisher of Kids, and documented in full in the film’s companion article11. The field research is blunter still: of the children found working the southern lake’s waters, more than half—57.6%—had been trafficked into forced labor.12

The Law Caught Up

For years, orphanage tourism lived in a gap: too charitable-looking for criminal law, too transnational for child-protection agencies. The gap has been closing, document by document—and the sequence is worth knowing, because it turns “a blogger told me orphanages are bad” into “the United Nations and national law say so”:

  1. 1989The Convention on the Rights of the Child—the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history—establishes that children shall not be separated from their parents against their will.13
  2. 2009The UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children set the modern standard: family-based care as the default, residential care as a last resort for the shortest appropriate time.14
  3. 2017–18Australia’s parliamentary inquiry and Modern Slavery Act make Australia the first country to recognize orphanage trafficking—the recruitment of children into institutions for profit—as a form of modern slavery.15
  4. 2019UN General Assembly resolution A/RES/74/133 devotes the annual Rights of the Child resolution to children without parental care and calls on states, in exact words, to prevent “the harms related to volunteering programmes in orphanages, including in the context of tourism, which can lead to trafficking and exploitation.”16

The direction is unambiguous, and it leaves travelers no comfortable ignorance to stand on. The question is no longer whether orphanage tourism harms children. The question is only whether your itinerary is current with the evidence.

Fair Work Behind the Welcome

Since 2011, the responsibilities have names. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, every business—hotel chains, cruise lines, booking platforms, tour operators—carries its own duty to respect human rights, independent of what local law tolerates. “We complied with local standards” stopped being an answer; so did “we didn’t know.”17

The pressure points are consistent across destinations:

  • Wages: a sector the ILO characterizes by low pay and informality3 is a sector where the bargain holiday’s discount is somebody’s income.
  • The gender gap: the women who are 54% of the workforce earn 14.7% less, and are concentrated in the lowest-paid, least secure roles.2
  • Migrant labor: much of tourism’s workforce migrates for the season or the job, and the classic abuses cluster there—recruitment fees that arrive as debt, withheld passports, contracts that change on arrival. The ILO’s fair-recruitment principles draw the line simply: recruitment costs belong to the employer, never the worker.18

What does fair look like from the outside? Four behaviors, all askable:

  • Direct employment over chains of subcontractors—the employer you can name is the employer you can hold to something.
  • Year-round work in seasonal places—or at least an honest answer to what happens to the staff in November.
  • Recruitment that costs the worker nothing—the ILO’s line, and the sharpest single question you can ask about migrant labor.18
  • A written stance on wages—“we pay a living wage,” on the record, outweighs any number of photos of smiling staff.

Travelers cannot audit a payroll—but they can move demand. Ask who employs the people you will meet, whether guides are paid a living wage, and whether workers paid to be hired. Put the questions in writing before you book. Operators with fair answers give them quickly; operators without them change the subject—and both responses tell you where your money should go.

THE CODE · FREE · NO EMAIL

Your Kindness Is a Business Model

An ethical trip is never guessed—it is checked into existence. Eleven evidence-based pages that turn good intentions into questions you can book on. Free and yours to keep.

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What You Can Do

Human rights in tourism are enforced at exactly one desk: the one where you book. The working rules, in the order they matter:

  • Refuse orphanage visits and volunteering—always. Decline every orphanage stop, school drop-in, and “children’s home” on any itinerary, and say why: visitor demand is a documented driver of family separation.
  • Redirect the help. The money an orphanage would have taken does more good with organizations that reunite families and fund community-based care—start with ReThink Orphanages and the Better Care Network.
  • Book child-safe, worker-fair operators. Prefer signatories of The Code; ask about direct employment, living wages, and recruitment fees—in writing, before you pay.
  • Apply the consent rule everywhere. Photograph people—especially children—only with permission that could actually have been refused. When in doubt, the camera stays down.

And run everything through the three questions: a trip that is fair to the people inside it will survive all three. The other pillars have their own deep dives—the animals, and the living culture of Crete.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it okay to visit an orphanage while traveling?
No—however reputable the operator sounds, and however good your motives are. About 80% of children in orphanages have a living parent (Lumos), and demand from visitors and volunteers is itself a documented driver of family separation: institutions recruit children to fill the beds that fees and donations make profitable. The UN General Assembly said it plainly in its 2019 Rights of the Child resolution (A/RES/74/133), calling on states to prevent “the harms related to volunteering programmes in orphanages, including in the context of tourism.” The kind act is redirecting that money to organizations that reunite families.
What is orphanage trafficking?
The active recruitment of children into orphanages or residential care for the purpose of exploitation and profit. Recruiters promise poor families schooling and food; paperwork then documents a loved child as parentless—a “paper orphan”—so that the institution can attract visitors, volunteers, and donations. Australia became the first country to recognize orphanage trafficking as a form of modern slavery in the inquiry behind its Modern Slavery Act 2018.
How can I actually help children in the places I visit?
Support what keeps families together: organizations working on family-based care and reunification (see ReThink Orphanages and the Better Care Network), community schools and health programs funded through accountable channels, and the local economy itself—the strongest child-protection program in any destination is parents with decent incomes. Never give money, sweets, or gifts to children directly: it rewards keeping children on the street or on display. And choose operators that are signatories of The Code, the industry’s child-protection standard.
What is voluntourism, and is it always harmful?
Voluntourism is travel organized around short-term volunteer work. It is not automatically harmful—but it fails predictably when the “help” involves vulnerable people, above all children in any form of residential care, or when unskilled visitors do work local people could be paid for. The honest test: does this placement exist because the community asked for it, or because my fee pays for it? Skilled work, requested by and accountable to the community, with no children in “care” settings on the itinerary, can pass. Everything else is a product wearing the costume of help.
What should I ask a tour operator about its workers?
Three questions expose most of the labor picture. Who employs the people I will meet—you directly, or a chain of subcontractors? Are your guides and drivers paid a living wage, and can I see that commitment in writing? Did any worker pay a recruitment fee for their job? (Under the ILO’s fair-recruitment principles, recruitment costs belong to the employer, never the worker.) Operators with fair answers give them quickly; operators without them change the subject.

Case Study: CRETAN®

Rights stay abstract until somebody’s working day makes them real. CRETAN®—disclosed here as our case study—was built on Crete around the people who do the work:

  • Tours led by local Cretans—work and wages that stay in the village, in season and out.
  • The large majority of tour revenue committed to the local Cretan economy—farms, tavernas, and family businesses, not intermediaries.
  • No children on display, no staged encounters—guests meet adults who chose to host them, on the hosts’ own terms.
Explore the CRETAN® model

About the Author

Steven spent a decade making documentaries in the places tourism forgets—with his work held in the archives of the UN’s International Labour Organization—before he went to live in one. He is completing an MSc in Responsible Tourism Management and founded CRETAN®, which appears here as a case study among the frameworks.

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Where to Go from Here

What Is Ethical Tourism?

Step back to the framework these cases sit in: the definition, the five pillars, and the three questions to run before booking.

Ethical Wildlife Tourism

The same demand logic applied to animals: attractions manufactured for visitors, and the four tests that expose a fake sanctuary.

Ethical Travel Guide for Crete

Consent and dignity made practical: how to meet a living culture as a guest, not an audience.

Explore Our Companion Resources

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References

  1. World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). 2026. Travel & Tourism Economic Impact 2025—the sector supported 366 million jobs (10.9% of global employment, more than one in ten) in 2025. WTTC. https://wttc.org/research/economic-impact/ (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  2. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). 2019. Global Report on Women in Tourism, Second Edition—54% of the tourism workforce is women (against 39% in the broader economy), and women in tourism earn 14.7% less than men. UNWTO. https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/book/10.18111/9789284420384 (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  3. International Labour Organization (ILO). Hotels, catering and tourism sector—the ILO characterizes the sector by low wages, variable and long working hours, the prevalence of informality, limited access to social protection, and gender-based discrimination. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/industries-and-sectors/hotels-catering-and-tourism-sector (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  4. Lumos Foundation. The problem—an estimated 5.4 million children live in institutions worldwide, and on average 80% of children in orphanages have a living parent. Lumos. https://www.wearelumos.org/why-were-here/the-problem/ (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  5. Desmond, C., Watt, K., Saha, A., Huang, J. & Lu, C. 2020. Prevalence and number of children living in institutional care: global, regional, and country estimates. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health 4(5), 370–377—a median estimate of 5.37 million children in institutional care. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30022-5/abstract (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  6. van IJzendoorn, M. H., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Duschinsky, R., et al. 2020. Institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children 1: a systematic and integrative review of evidence regarding effects on development. The Lancet Psychiatry 7(8), 703–720—308 studies across 68 countries and more than 100,000 children link institutional care to delays in physical growth, brain development, cognition, and attention, deepest for the youngest and worse the longer the stay. The Lancet Psychiatry (Lancet Group Commission). https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30399-2/abstract (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  7. UNICEF Cambodia. 2020. Caring for children left behind in residential care—more than 80% of children in Cambodia’s residential care institutions have at least one living parent; institutions multiplied while orphan numbers declined, driven in part by orphanage tourism. UNICEF. https://www.unicef.org/cambodia/stories/caring-children-left-behind-residential-care-during-covid-19 (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  8. Rowling, J. K. 2019. Launch of the #HelpingNotHelping campaign (October 24, 2019)—“Despite the best of intentions, the sad truth is that visiting and volunteering in orphanages drives an industry that separates children from their families and puts them at risk of neglect and abuse.”. jkrowling.com / Lumos. https://www.jkrowling.com/j-k-rowling-launches-campaign-to-end-orphanage-tourism-and-volunteering/ (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  9. ECPAT International. 1998. The Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism—six auditable criteria for travel companies, from staff training to reporting mechanisms. The Code / ECPAT International. https://thecode.org/ (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  10. International Labour Organization / IPEC. 2013. Analytical Study on Child Labour in Volta Lake Fishing in Ghana—the primary study behind the ILO’s long-standing estimate of some 20,000 children in forced labor in the lake’s fishing industry. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/publications/analytical-study-child-labour-volta-lake-fishing-ghana (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  11. Keen, S. 2026. Child Slavery on Lake Volta: Ghana’s Trafficking Crisis—the story behind the documentary Fisher of Kids. fisherofkids.com. https://www.fisherofkids.com/child-slavery-on-lake-volta/ (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  12. International Justice Mission (IJM). 2016. Child Trafficking into Forced Labor on Lake Volta, Ghana: A Mixed-Methods Assessment—IJM’s 2013 operational assessment found that more than half (57.6%, 444 of 771) of the children working on southern Lake Volta’s waters had been trafficked into forced labor. International Justice Mission. https://www.ijm.org/studies/child-trafficking-into-forced-labor-on-lake-volta-ghana (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  13. United Nations. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child—the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history; Article 9 protects children from separation from their parents against their will. OHCHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  14. UN General Assembly. 2009. Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (resolution A/RES/64/142)—family-based care as the default; residential care as a last resort, for the shortest appropriate time. United Nations. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/673583 (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  15. Parliament of Australia. 2017. Hidden in Plain Sight—Chapter 8, Orphanage trafficking: the inquiry that led Australia to become the first country to recognize orphanage trafficking as a form of modern slavery under its Modern Slavery Act 2018. Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Foreign_Affairs_Defence_and_Trade/ModernSlavery/Final_report/section?id=committees%2Freportjnt%2F024102%2F25036 (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  16. UN General Assembly. 2019. Resolution A/RES/74/133, Rights of the Child (adopted December 18, 2019)—calls on states to take “appropriate measures to prevent and address the harms related to volunteering programmes in orphanages, including in the context of tourism, which can lead to trafficking and exploitation”. United Nations. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3848250 (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  17. United Nations. 2011. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights—states must protect human rights, businesses (including hotels, cruise lines, and tour operators) must respect them, and victims must have access to remedy. OHCHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/publications/reference-publications/guiding-principles-business-and-human-rights (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  18. International Labour Organization (ILO). 2019. General Principles and Operational Guidelines for Fair Recruitment—no recruitment fees or related costs should be charged to workers; they belong to the employer. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/publications/general-principles-and-operational-guidelines-fair-recruitment-and (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩
  19. United Nations. 2007. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)—including the principle of free, prior, and informed consent. UN General Assembly. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html (accessed July 9, 2026). ↩

Further Reading

Our Editorial Standards

This is an independent resource, written and maintained by Steven Keen—a responsible tourism practitioner based on Crete, completing an MSc in Responsible Tourism Management and certified by the GSTC and ICRT. Every statistic is cited to its primary source, every page carries an honest last-updated date, and where a figure cannot be verified, we flag it—rather than guess. Seasonal claims—festivals, opening patterns, on-island services—are re-checked on the island as the seasons turn, and every reference carries the date it was last accessed. We disclose our connection to CRETAN®, which appears here as one documented case study among the frameworks.

Read our full editorial standards