Ethical Tourism

Ethical Tourism & Human Rights: The People Behind the Trip

By Steven Keen

MSc candidate in Responsible Tourism Management, GSTC- and ICRT-certified

29 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 as marked 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 institutions—estimates range from 5.4 to 8 million, depending on the source and on which institutions are counted4 5 6—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.7 Cambodia, the best-documented case, watched institutions multiply through tourism’s boom years even as actual orphanhood declined.8 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, 20199

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.10 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: Ghana’s national Child Labour Survey found some 49,000 children working in fishing nationwide, 20,000 of them in the Volta Region alone,11 and advocacy groups have long put the number of enslaved children on the lake itself above 20,000—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 article12. The field research is blunter still: in IJM’s operational assessment on the lake (2013 data), more than half of the children found working the southern lake’s waters—57.6%—had been trafficked into forced labor.13

The Code
for Travelers Who Don’t Buy
Their Own Good Intentions
Good intentions built the orphanage.
Good questions close it.
ethicaltourism.com
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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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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.14
  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.15
  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.16
  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.”17

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.

When Helping Is the Product

The orphanage is voluntourism’s sharpest failure, but it is not a special case. It is what happens whenever the thing being sold is the experience of helping—priced by the week, marketed to the helper—rather than the help itself. Once the fee, and not the community’s request, is what summons the project into being, the same paradox reappears wherever you look for it. Two more places it predictably lands:

The clinic. Four years of ethnographic research in Tanzania’s health facilities documented placement agencies marketing hospital wards as places where foreigners can “make a difference”—in the study’s words—“regardless of their skill set,” discounting Tanzanian expertise so that volunteers could be imagined into expert roles, and defending untrained hands at the bedside as “better than nothing at all.”18 Run that against the standard you accept at home: a visitor who could not legally take your blood pressure in their own country has no business practicing on a poorer patient abroad. Medical care is the one product where “better than nothing” is false on its face—unqualified treatment is not a smaller kindness; it is a risk transferred to someone with no way to refuse it.

The building site. Construction voluntourism fails more quietly. On Learning Service—the volunteer-travel-reform platform behind the book-length Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad—Cambodian educator Dork Silong documents the mechanics from the receiving end: a professional builder who set aside his own trade to shepherd unskilled volunteers for $5–10 a day; a volunteer-built house that “became completely misshapen” after a single windstorm, leaving the family to rebuild it themselves; and the one-line explanation of why communities keep saying yes—“volunteers bring money with them, and money equals power.”19 Every unskilled brick a visitor lays for free is a day’s wage a local mason never saw. The community did not need your labor; it tolerated your labor as the price of your money.

And the critique is no longer imported. #NoWhiteSaviors, the Uganda-based campaign founded by Ugandan and American social workers, has spent years making this page’s argument from the receiving end of “help”: that a system which trusts foreign goodwill on sight endangers the very people it claims to serve—down to the child-protection case, the need to protect children from those “who come to prey on them in the name of ‘doing good.’”20

The test survives every variant: does this placement exist because the community asked for it—or because your fee pays for it? The question is never whether you meant well. It is whether the project would survive the loss of your money.

Skilled work, requested by and accountable to the people it serves, passes—a surgeon in a program her hosts designed, an engineer training local engineers. Everything else is a product wearing the costume of help. And the costume, remember, is tailored for you.

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.”21

The pressure points are consistent across destinations:

  • Wages: a sector the ILO characterizes as marked 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.22

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.22
  • 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 Ship That Chooses Its Law

Everything this page says about fair work meets its hardest case a few miles offshore. A cruise ship is a workplace of a thousand people that selects, before anyone is hired, which country’s labor law will govern them—by choosing the flag it flies. Nearly all cruise ships are registered outside the United States—where the industry’s largest company is headquartered—often in Panama or the Bahamas,23 under what the International Transport Workers’ Federation calls flags of convenience: a flag with no genuine link to the ship’s real owner, offering “cheap registration fees, and low or no taxes”—and the freedom, in the ITF’s words, to “recruit the cheapest labour they can find, pay minimal wages and cut costs by lowering standards.”24

There is a floor. The ILO’s Maritime Labour Convention, 2006—in force since 2013, ratified by 113 states covering 96.6% of the world’s shipping tonnage—sets minimums for contracts, hours and rest, wages, medical care, and repatriation.25 But a floor is exactly what it sounds like, and it still has to be enforced against the ship’s chosen law: in 2025 alone, ITF inspectors recovered US$45.2 million in wages owed to seafarers.24

What the structure produces below deck is documented. Lizzie Presser’s investigation “Below Deck” followed the Filipino workers who make up nearly a third of the industry’s workforce: a dishwasher earning roughly $1.75 an hour; workweeks past 75 hours with no day off; and a shipboard order in which rank tracks passport closely enough that officers and below-deck crew eat in separate mess halls.23 Crews are recruited country by country at whatever each sending country’s market will bear—the ITF’s “cheapest labour they can find”—and the industry publishes no tier sheet, so this page will not invent one. The structure itself is the documented fact: on one ship, one corridor separates wage worlds, and the border between them is nationality.

Ashore, the arithmetic lands on the port. Klein’s survey of responsible cruise tourism documents port communities financing cruise infrastructure—Falmouth, Jamaica’s US$225 million terminal—while being pressured to keep per-passenger head taxes low, so that, “like many other ports, they may end up subsidising the cruise industry.”26 A visitor who sleeps, eats, and shops on board is the thinnest possible version of the question this resource asks everywhere—where does the money land?—and the overtourism pillar follows that arithmetic the rest of the way into residents’ lives.

The environmental record needs no adjectives; it has a court file. In December 2016, Princess Cruise Lines pleaded guilty to seven felony charges and paid $40 million—the largest criminal penalty ever imposed for deliberate vessel pollution—after a newly hired engineer reported the “magic pipe” rigged to send oily waste from the Caribbean Princess straight overboard, and the cover-up that followed.27 While serving the resulting probation, Princess and its parent Carnival were back before the same court in June 2019, admitting six probation violations—among them, sending undisclosed teams aboard to prepare ships for the independent inspections—and paying another $20 million.28 A company that cheats the audit it accepted under criminal sentence has told you exactly how to read its brochure.

None of this makes the ship unbookable. It makes the ship askable, like every operator on this page—in writing, before you pay: What flag does the ship fly, and why? Is the crew covered by an ITF agreement? Did any crew member pay a fee to be recruited?22 And in port, get off the ship with money to spend where you actually landed—the town is not scenery either.

When the Neighborhood Is the Attraction

Between the village gate and the hotel corridor sits a case this page cannot dodge: the tour whose destination is a poor neighborhood—Rio’s favelas, Cape Town’s townships, Mumbai’s Dharavi, Nairobi’s Kibera. It is not a fringe product. The field’s own state-of-the-art review counts more than a million such tourists a year, most on two- to three-hour guided walks, 80% of them in just two places: South Africa’s townships and Brazil’s favelas.36 The same review names the shift underneath the numbers—tourism is no longer only a means of fighting poverty; “poverty is an attraction of tourism.”36

The case for it deserves its strongest form, which is not the brochure’s. Money that reaches a neighborhood the formal economy skipped is real money: guides, drivers, cooks, homestay owners, the stall that feeds the group at the end of the walk. Visibility is real too—a district outsiders know only as a crime statistic acquires residents with trades, names, and opinions, and researchers record the self-esteem that can come from outsiders taking a community seriously.36 Some tours are owned and guided by the people who live there: the collection that opened this research field carries chapters on slum tourism “for the poor, by the poor” and on favela tourism that listens to local voices, beside its sharpest critiques.37 And support inside a community runs higher where residents help produce the tourism rather than merely being toured by it.36

The case against is not squeamishness. Melissa Nisbett’s ethnography of the Dharavi tours found a settlement of a million people narrated as a hive of industry—$665 million in annual turnover from its workshops—while the sanitation, the water, and the overcrowding dropped out of the script, replaced by “a vision of resourcefulness, hard work and diligence.” The framing worked so well that visitors overlooked, and sometimes denied, the poverty in front of them, and left, in her finding, with little understanding of the need for change.38 That is the charge in her title: the tour depoliticizes poverty, and the people it leaves empowered are the ones who already were.

The deeper objection is structural rather than a complaint about one operator. Dürr and Jaffe begin their theorization of the field with what the product is made of: poverty, squalor, and violence turned into something purchasable, drawing on altruism and voyeurism at once, and raising the questions this page keeps asking—power, inequality, and who gets to be a subject rather than a sight.39 The asymmetry is in the direction of the gaze: the visitor looks, the resident is looked at; the visitor leaves, the resident is the exhibit either way. Nobody on that street signed the agreement that made it one. The money often runs the same direction: where the larger operators are owned outside the neighborhood—in South Africa, resident-run tours were displaced by professional companies based elsewhere—earnings leak out of the place being toured, and residents are “rarely consulted by tour operators,” left as “mute actors, performing in a play without a say.”36

The rule this page has been building decides it here too: the encounter is the community’s to shape, host, and end.

Which is why “go” and “don’t go” are both too cheap an answer. The same street can carry a tour its residents own, price, and cancel in a bad week, and a tour that arrives unasked, photographs what it likes, and banks the fee three suburbs away. Four questions separate them before you pay. Who owns the operator, and who guides—people who live there, or people who drive in? Where does the fee land, and can they show you? Who set the route and the rules—the main Dharavi operator, for one, bans cameras outright36—and can the community change them? And could the community end it tomorrow if it decided the visit costs more than it pays? When the answers belong to the neighborhood, you are somebody’s guest. When they belong to the operator, the neighborhood is the product, and the people in it were never asked.

When the Attraction Is a Person

The consent rule has one more place to go, and it is the hardest one: the point where tourism meets the sex trade. The industry’s own charter has already ruled on it. The Global Code of Ethics for Tourism declares that “the exploitation of human beings in any form, particularly sexual, especially when applied to children, conflicts with the fundamental aims of tourism and is the negation of tourism”—to be penalized by the laws of the country visited and of the traveler’s own country alike, “even when they are carried out abroad.”40 The scale that sentence answers to: an estimated 6.3 million people are in situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation at any point in time—nearly four out of five of them girls or women, about a quarter of them children.41

This page has already built the test the adult case needs. A yes that cannot be refused—because rent, debt, a family’s food, or a trafficker’s ledger stands behind it—is not the same word as yes. That rule does not expire at eighteen. “She’s an adult” and “it’s legal here” answer a different question; the question that matters is whether the yes could have been no. And inside the trade that organizes itself around visitor demand, coercion is not a rare defect: trafficking for sexual exploitation accounted for 36% of the trafficking victims detected worldwide in 2022, more than 90% of them women and girls—and court cases across regions record women and girls sexually exploited in the context of the tourism industry, in hotels and tourist resorts.42

The consent rule does not expire at adulthood: a yes purchased across someone’s desperation is circumstances, not consent.

For children, the industry built machinery: The Code’s six criteria exist precisely because the sexual exploitation of children follows travel.10 That machinery stops, by design, at the eighteenth birthday—there is no adult equivalent of The Code. But adults are not unclaimed territory. Wherever coercion, deception, or the abuse of vulnerability is present, the adult case is trafficking under international law—the legal ground organizations like Equality Now work to hold—and their definition is this section’s rule written as law: sexual exploitation “occurs when someone abuses another person’s vulnerability or their own position of power or trust for sexual purposes.”43

Coercion does not advertise, but it leaks. The signals a traveler can actually notice:

  • Someone else does the talking: the person is spoken for, introduced by a “manager,” never alone—and the conversation ends when the minder arrives.
  • The person controls nothing: the money goes to a third party, the documents live with someone else, the door is not theirs to use.
  • Age is treated as negotiable: a venue that discourages the question has answered it.
  • Fear outlasts the sales pitch: rehearsed answers, watchfulness, distress showing through the script.

What to do with a signal is governed by the same rule this page applied at the orphanage gate: report, don’t play rescuer. Working with exploited people is a job for local experts, not for travelers—a confrontation staged by a foreigner is paid for later by the person it meant to help, and “buying someone’s freedom” is indistinguishable, on the trade’s books, from revenue. Note the specifics—place, time, what you saw—and hand them to people with the power to act: the national anti-trafficking hotline where one exists, the hotel’s management and your tour operator in writing, and—if a child is involved—the police of your own country, whose laws the Global Code of Ethics expects to follow their citizens abroad.40

Which leaves the question travelers actually ask, and it deserves a plain answer. “Prostitution is legal here, and we are both adults—whose business is it?” Between genuine equals, nobody’s. But genuine equality is exactly what the settings priced for visitors cannot show you: where the buyer earns in one economy and the seller owes in another, you cannot verify the half of the transaction that matters—whether the yes could have been no. With 6.3 million people held in forced commercial sexual exploitation and the court record placing its victims in hotels and tourist resorts, that uncertainty is not an edge case; it is the known supply chain. The plain answer: where you cannot know the yes was free, the purchase is a bet that someone else’s desperation was consent—and a traveler who has read this far does not take that bet.

When the Destination Outlaws You

One rights question on this page points at the traveler, and it deserves the same plain treatment. “Should I visit a country that criminalizes people like me—or my friends?” The scale of the question first: 65 UN member states criminalize consensual same-sex sexual acts, and in seven of them the statute book prescribes death—a total that grew in 2025 for the first time in almost a decade.44 For LGBTQ+ travelers this is not an abstraction: the law that targets residents does not exempt guests. And the boycott instinct—don’t fund it—is at least asking this page’s own first question: where does the money land?

Answer it honestly, though, and the boycott stops being automatic. Withdraw a booking and the loss lands first on the housekeeper, the guide, and the seasonal contract—the people this page opened with, some of whom are exactly the people the law targets—long before it reaches the ministers who wrote the statute. So the second test decides: whose voices? Local LGBTQ+ organizations live with both the law and the consequences of your answer, and their own travel statements outrank every boycott call issued from safety. When Bermuda replaced same-sex marriage with domestic partnerships in 2018 and #BoycottBermuda trended abroad, the Rainbow Alliance of Bermuda drew the line itself: “While the RAoB does not support the ‘Boycott Bermuda’ movement, we understand why LGBTQ people would choose not to spend their money in visiting a place where they are seen as separate but equal in the eyes of the law.”45 Both halves of that sentence are instructions: the anger is legitimate—and the people who stay are the ones entitled to aim it.

The working rule, then: before striking a destination off the map—or booking it in defiance—find what its own LGBTQ+ organizations ask of travelers, and treat that as the ruling. Where they ask for presence, bring it deliberately: visible, informed, spent into the businesses that stand with them. Where they ask for distance, keep it—and say why, in writing, to the operator and the tourism board, because a boycott nobody announces is just an empty room. And through all of it, safety outranks solidarity: read the law of a place before you book it, the way this page reads every product—as it is, not as the brochure says.

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.

Letters from inside the question

The Antidote to the Travel Brochure

The tourism industry is loud, crowded, and always trying to sell you something. These letters are the drive into the hills. A dispatch on the first Thursday of every month, exploring how to travel differently.

Step into the library

Case Study: Friends-International

Rights get real where someone acts on them. Friends-International—a social enterprise born on the streets of Phnom Penh in 1994, and winner of the 2007 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship—runs the ChildSafe Movement, whose “Children Are Not Tourist Attractions” campaign taught the travel industry the exact lesson this page’s flagship teaches: the kindest-looking excursion, the orphanage visit, is often the engine of the harm.46

It names the paradox

  • ChildSafe states that an estimated 80% of the roughly 8 million children living in institutions worldwide are not orphans—they have a living parent or family—and that orphanage tourism “contributes to the separation of families.”6

It tells travelers the truth

  • Its “7 Tips for Travelers” lead with “Children are not tourist attractions,” and warn that volunteering with children can itself be harmful—work in institutions such as orphanages “is a job for local experts, not for travelers.”47

It proves the humane alternative works

  • Friends-International reports helping more than 4,000 children in orphanages reintegrate with their families, and in a single year (2018) directly serving 52,000 children, youth, and caregivers—with 94,000 more reached through its ChildSafe Alliance across seven countries.46
  • Through the ChildSafe Movement it reports advising 412 companies worldwide on child-protection policies and reaching 17 million people in 16 languages.46

What it proves—and its limit

What is externally documented is the authority: the 2007 Skoll Award, and Friends-International’s standing as a named partner inside UNICEF Cambodia’s own child-protection work—third-party facts, not self-description. The core paradox—that most institutionalized children have living parents, and that visitor demand drives institutionalization—is corroborated independently by the peer-reviewed literature, the 2019 UN Resolution on the Rights of the Child, and the 2020 Lancet Commission already cited above. The honest limits: the impact figures are the organization’s own numbers—credible, and vetted through the Skoll Foundation’s due diligence, but not a line-audited external count; the 80% figure is an estimate with a real range across countries; and its frontline work is centered on Southeast Asia. It is a respected exemplar of the principle, cited here independently—not a partner of, or a badge held by, this resource.

Human rights in tourism means the welcome can never rest on a separated family or an unconsenting child—and Friends-International proves the humane answer to the orphanage paradox is not a better visit, but no visit at all, and a child back home.

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.

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: a tiny mountain village on Crete. He is completing an MSc in Responsible Tourism Management, GSTC- & ICRT-certified, and the founder of CRETAN®, which serves as a documented case study. Learn more.

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

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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  2. UN Tourism (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. UN Tourism. https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/book/10.18111/9789284420384 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  3. International Labour Organization (ILO). Hotels, catering and tourism sector—the ILO characterizes the sector as marked 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 August 6, 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 August 6, 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  6. ChildSafe Movement (Friends-International). “Children Are Not Tourist Attractions”—the campaign’s statement that an estimated 80% of the roughly 8 million children living in institutions worldwide are not orphans, and that orphanage tourism contributes to the separation of families. ChildSafe Movement. https://thinkchildsafe.org/children-are-not-tourist-attractions/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
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  8. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  9. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  10. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  11. International Labour Organization / IPEC. 2013. Analytical Study on Child Labour in Volta Lake Fishing in Ghana—the ILO/IPEC field study reporting the Ghana Child Labour Survey’s count of some 49,000 children working in fishing nationwide, 20,000 of them in the Volta Region. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/publications/analytical-study-child-labour-volta-lake-fishing-ghana (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  12. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  13. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  14. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  15. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  16. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  17. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  18. Sullivan, N. 2018. International clinical volunteering in Tanzania: a postcolonial analysis of a Global Health business. Global Public Health 13(3), 310–324—four years of ethnographic research (41 foreign volunteers, 90 Tanzanian health workers) on placement organizations that market health facilities as sites where foreigners can “make a difference” “regardless of their skill set,” discounting Tanzanian expertise and framing untrained volunteers as “better than nothing at all.” Global Public Health. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28670971/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  19. Silong, D. So, You Want to Build Me a House? (part two)—a Cambodian educator’s account of construction voluntourism from the receiving end: a professional builder sidelined onto $5–10 a day so paying volunteers could do his work, a volunteer-built house that “became completely misshapen” after a single windstorm, and the one-line mechanism: “volunteers bring money with them, and money equals power.” Learning Service. https://learningservice.info/so-you-want-to-build-me-a-house-part-two/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  20. No White Saviors. #NoWhiteSaviors—the Uganda-based advocacy campaign founded by Ugandan and American social workers, documenting the harm side of imported “help,” including the child-protection case: “We need to do better at protecting our children from foreign men who come to prey on them in the name of ‘doing good.’” No White Saviors (Medium). https://nowhitesaviors.medium.com/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  21. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  22. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  23. Presser, L. 2017. Below Deck (February 2, 2017)—the investigation of the Filipino workers who are nearly a third of the cruise industry’s workforce: a dishwasher earning about $1.75 an hour, workweeks beyond 75 hours with no day off, ships registered in Panama or the Bahamas to stay outside U.S. labor law, and officers and below-deck crew eating in separate mess halls. Type Investigations / The California Sunday Magazine. https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2017/02/02/below-deck/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  24. International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF). Flags of convenience—a ship flying “the flag of a country other than the country of ownership,” chosen for “cheap registration fees, and low or no taxes” and the freedom to “recruit the cheapest labour they can find, pay minimal wages and cut costs by lowering standards”; in 2025 the ITF’s 130 inspectors recovered US$45.2 million in wages owed to seafarers. ITF Seafarers. https://www.itfglobal.org/en/sector/seafarers/flags-of-convenience (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  25. International Labour Organization (ILO). 2006. Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC, 2006)—the consolidated minimum standards for work at sea (employment agreements, hours of work and rest, wages, repatriation, accommodation, medical care); in force since August 20, 2013, ratified by 113 states covering 96.6% of world gross shipping tonnage. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/international-labour-standards/maritime-labour-convention-2006 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  26. Klein, R. A. 2011. Responsible Cruise Tourism: Issues of Cruise Tourism and Sustainability. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management 18(1), 107–116—port communities financing cruise infrastructure (Falmouth’s US$225 million terminal) while pressured to keep passenger head taxes low, such that “like many other ports, they may end up subsidising the cruise industry.” Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-hospitality-and-tourism-management/article/abs/responsible-cruise-tourism-issues-of-cruise-tourism-and-sustainability/7DC8234DDFDD3736150DB96C2F300099 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  27. U.S. Department of Justice. 2016. Princess Cruise Lines to Pay Largest-Ever Criminal Penalty for Deliberate Vessel Pollution (December 1, 2016)—seven felony charges and a $40 million penalty, the largest ever imposed for deliberate vessel pollution, for the “magic pipe” used to discharge oily waste from the Caribbean Princess and the cover-up that followed, reported by a newly hired engineer. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/princess-cruise-lines-pay-largest-ever-criminal-penalty-deliberate-vessel-pollution (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  28. U.S. Department of Justice. 2019. Princess Cruise Lines and Its Parent Company Plead Guilty to Environmental Probation Violations, Ordered to Pay $20 Million Criminal Penalty (June 3, 2019)—six admitted probation violations, including sending undisclosed teams aboard to prepare ships for the independent inspections required during probation. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/princess-cruise-lines-and-its-parent-company-plead-guilty-environmental-probation-violations (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  29. 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 August 6, 2026). ↩
  30. Parks Australia. Joint management, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park—since the 1985 Handback the park has been jointly managed under a 12-member Board of Management on which the eight members nominated by Anangu Traditional Owners hold the majority, with Tjukurpa (Anangu law) guiding what happens in the park. Parks Australia / Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. https://uluru.gov.au/about/joint-management/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  31. Parks Australia. Uluru climb closure—the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Management voted unanimously in November 2017 to close the Uluru climb, its criteria (visitors climbing below 20%) having been met; the climb closed permanently on October 26, 2019, the 34th anniversary of the park’s Handback to Anangu: “The land has law and Culture. We welcome tourists here. Closing the climb is not something to feel upset about but a cause for celebration” (Sammy Wilson, board chairman). Parks Australia / Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. https://uluru.gov.au/discover/history/uluru-climb-closure/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  32. Survival International. The Ang (Jarawa)—the campaign page on the Andaman Trunk Road: India’s Supreme Court ordered the road through the reserve closed in 2002, yet it remains open, encouraging “human safaris” in which tour operators drive tourists along it “in the hope of ‘spotting’ Ang people, something reminiscent of the horrific ‘human zoos’ from the colonial era”; an Ang man: “I don’t like it when they take photos from their vehicles.” Survival International. https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/jarawa (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  33. Survival International. 2013. Victory for “human safari” campaign as court bans tourists (January 22, 2013)—India’s Supreme Court’s interim order banning tourists from the Andaman Trunk Road after the Andaman administration answered the Court’s July 2012 Buffer Zone order with a watered-down notification keeping the roadside tourist attractions open; the seven-week ban cut traffic by two-thirds before being reversed. Survival International. https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8941 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  34. Harding, A. 2008. Burmese women in Thai “human zoo” (BBC News, January 30, 2008)—on the “long-neck” Kayan villages of Mae Hong Son: “It’s absolutely a human zoo,” said the UNHCR’s regional spokeswoman, after Thai authorities had for two years refused to let some 20 Kayan leave for resettlement in Finland and New Zealand while roughly 20,000 other Burmese refugees moved on—the suspicion being that the women were kept for their role in the local tourism industry. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7215182.stm (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  35. Asia Times. 2018. Forget the boycott, come and visit us, “long-neck” Kayan mother says (January 9, 2018)—residents of Huay Pu Keng, one of the three Kayan villages, ask travelers to come on the village’s own terms: “they want to share their Kayan culture with visitors in a meaningful way, a cross-cultural exchange with a sincere experience.” Asia Times. https://asiatimes.com/2018/01/forget-boycott-come-visit-us-long-neck-kayan-says/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  36. Frenzel, F., Koens, K., Steinbrink, M. & Rogerson, C. M. 2015. Slum Tourism: State of the Art. Tourism Review International 18(4), 237–252—the field’s survey of its own evidence: the authors’ estimate of more than one million slum tourists a year, 80% of them in just two destinations (the townships of South Africa and the favelas of Brazil); the displacement of resident-run tours by larger, externally owned operators and the economic leakage that follows; residents “rarely consulted by tour operators,” remaining “like mute actors, performing in a play without a say or control on future developments”; higher local support where residents participate in producing the tourism; and the strict no-camera policy of the main Dharavi operator. Tourism Review International. https://doi.org/10.3727/154427215X14230549904017 (accessed August 6, 2026). Open-access copy (BUas research repository, PDF): https://pure.buas.nl/ws/files/315418/Koens_slum_tourism_state_of_the_art.pdf. ↩
  37. Frenzel, F., Koens, K. & Steinbrink, M. (eds.). 2012. Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics—the edited volume that opened the research field, spanning township, favela, and Dharavi tourism, with chapters including “Slum tourism: for the poor, by the poor” and “Favela tourism: listening to local voices” alongside its critical accounts. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203136751 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  38. Nisbett, M. 2017. Empowering the empowered? Slum tourism and the depoliticization of poverty. Geoforum 85, 37–45—ethnographic fieldwork on the Dharavi tours: a settlement of one million people presented through its hutment industries and their $665 million annual turnover, while its sanitation, water, and overcrowding are “ignored and replaced by a vision of resourcefulness, hard work and diligence”—so successfully, Nisbett finds, that visitors overlook or even deny the poverty in front of them and leave with little understanding of the need for change. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.07.007 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  39. Dürr, E. & Jaffe, R. 2012. Theorizing Slum Tourism: Performing, Negotiating and Transforming Inequality. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 93, 113–123—slum tourism “involves transforming poverty, squalor and violence into a tourism product” and, “drawing on both altruism and voyeurism,” raises questions of power, inequality, and subjectivity. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CEDLA). https://doi.org/10.18352/erlacs.8367 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  40. UN Tourism (UNWTO). 1999. Global Code of Ethics for Tourism—Article 2: “The exploitation of human beings in any form, particularly sexual, especially when applied to children, conflicts with the fundamental aims of tourism and is the negation of tourism,” to be penalized by the national legislation of both the countries visited and the perpetrators’ own countries, “even when they are carried out abroad.” UN Tourism. https://www.untourism.int/global-code-of-ethics-for-tourism (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  41. International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free & International Organization for Migration (IOM). 2022. Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage—an estimated 6.3 million people are in situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation at any point in time; nearly four out of every five of them are girls or women, and 1.7 million (about a quarter) are children. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/global-estimates-modern-slavery-forced-labour-and-forced-marriage (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  42. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 2024. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024—trafficking for sexual exploitation accounted for 36% of detected victims worldwide in 2022, more than 90% of them women or girls; court cases across regions report women and girls sexually exploited “in the context of the tourism industry,” in hotels and tourist resorts. UNODC. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/glotip.html (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  43. Equality Now. End sexual exploitation—the survivor-centered legal-advocacy program whose working definition anchors the adult case: “Sexual exploitation occurs when someone abuses another person’s vulnerability or their own position of power or trust for sexual purposes,” in intimate, commercial, physical, and digital contexts. Equality Now. https://equalitynow.org/what-we-do/end-sexual-exploitation/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  44. ILGA World. 2026. Pride Month: new ILGA World data and maps on laws affecting LGBTI people globally—65 UN member states criminalize consensual same-sex sexual acts (a total that grew in 2025 for the first time in almost a decade), and in 7 of them the death penalty is the legally prescribed punishment. ILGA World (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). https://ilga.org/news/pride-month-2026-lgbti-maps-data/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  45. Rainbow Alliance of Bermuda. 2018. Statement on Bermuda Government & Opposition pursuing LGBTQ+ tourism after passing DPA (March 7, 2018)—“While the RAoB does not support the ‘Boycott Bermuda’ movement, we understand why LGBTQ people would choose not to spend their money in visiting a place where they are seen as separate but equal in the eyes of the law.” Rainbow Alliance of Bermuda. https://medium.com/@RainbowBermuda/statement-on-bermuda-government-opposition-pursuing-lgbtq-tourism-after-passing-dpa-7ba3071d3470 (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  46. Skoll Foundation. Friends-International—awarded the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2007); the organization reports helping more than 4,000 children in orphanages reintegrate with their families, directly serving 52,000 children, youth, and caregivers in 2018, with 94,000 more reached through the ChildSafe Alliance in seven countries; advising 412 companies worldwide; and reaching 17 million people in 16 languages through the ChildSafe Movement’s campaigns. Skoll Foundation. https://skoll.org/organization/friends-international/ (accessed August 6, 2026). ↩
  47. ChildSafe Movement (Friends-International). 7 Tips for Travelers—Tip 1, “Children are not tourist attractions,” and Tip 2, that volunteering with children can be harmful: working with children in institutions such as orphanages is a job for local experts, not for travelers. ChildSafe Movement. https://thinkchildsafe.org/7-tips-for-travelers-page/ (accessed August 6, 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 serves as a documented case study. Nothing here is sponsored, and the site sells nothing and takes no bookings. Read our full editorial standards.