Working holiday tourists can be traced back to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European trend of ‘tramping’; a practice whereby young lower-and working-class men travelled around Europe to undertake labour for economic necessity. In the late 1950s to early 1960s, the middle to upper classes in Great Britain adopted the practice of tramping in the form of long-term budget travelling for fun and adventure.

In 1962, the British Universities North America Club began offering gap year work and volunteer exchange programmes in North America (refer to Wilson et al, 2009). This was a pivotal moment that saw working holidays grow in popularity, starting with Great Britain and expanding beyond Europe and into other White colonial nations (namely Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and into North America). Following this period of growth, Cohen (1973, p. 91) described the working holiday as a practice whereby ‘youths from one country travel into another to work for short periods, mostly during summer-school vacations’.

The nature of what it means to be a working holiday tourist has since changed drastically. Initially, working holiday programmes were championed for enabling freedom of movement between citizens from English-speaking nations with strong social ties and, more recently, for enabling a wider breadth of travel experiences and cultural exchanges amongst young people, whilst fostering closer ties between reciprocal partner countries.

However, working holiday programmes have been criticized by many scholars and social commentators. This is because governments of more privileged nations are increasingly using working holiday tourists to meet the demands of their unskilled workforces – often at the expense of prioritizing working holiday tourists’ safety and welfare. The positions that working tourists are typically encouraged to fill (often through incentives such as visa extensions) usually exist in jobs that are undesirable to local citizens. These jobs are commonly found in rural or regional areas (for example, farm work and fruit and vegetable picking) and are typified by dangerous, hard, manual labour, unsafe and poor conditions, precarious and seasonal work and low pay (consider Reilly, 2018).