There are 3,800 elephant’s captive in Asia for tourism purposes (Daly 2019). For many millennials who visit Thailand, it is an aspiration to visit an elephant attraction. This interest has been progressively powered by social media because tourists post imagery of their experiences of the animals instantaneously (Daly 2019)
From a positive point of view the increase of tourism enables sanctuaries to be able to fund and create a safe environment for the animals to live out their older years, whilst also creating a unique experience with the elephants to attract tourism.
25-30% of the sanctuary’s tourists find the sanctuary through social media, including Facebook and Instagram (Sujintara, 2019) using Geotagging is important to the sanctuary so that “people get to know about us more and know what we are doing for elephants and will not get the wrong understanding about us”
(Sujintara, 2019)(see appendix 3). The findings from this research provide insight for millennials when investigating sanctuaries to visit. They know the kind of experience they will encounter. if any illegal or inhumane activities are happening, or tourists have a negative experience following the visit there is a high chance this will be portrayed through social media, resulting in lack of support for that company.
Even though there are positive aspects to social media for animal conservation, there is an increase in negatives. Due to the increasing demand for sanctuaries throughout Asia, this has created a hard balance to distinguish if the welfare for the animal comes first or the wealth of the company.
Social media has helped to identify inhumane sanctuaries by spreading imagery of the behaviours from employees. Due to this movement, 160 travel companies have stopped their marketing and ticket sales at venues offering elephant rides and shows (Marshall, 2017) to address these issues and try stop business to these companies. It is ironic that social media both created the increase in tourism and those same apps are now driving people away once they see the ‘real life’ effects of the experience. Further studies identified by World Animal Protection is the cruelty of tigers. With the high demand in Thailand for imagery and interaction with this species there has been a 33% increase compared to five years ago of captive tigers (World Animal Protection, 2017) This is another example how the Experience Economy is being portrayed negatively on social media.
From evaluating all the data from animal conservation, it shows that the power social media and geotagging is having on the experience economy of animals in Asia. Social media is helping provide insight into legitimate, safe businesses and allowing customers and consumers to understand their experience before going ahead to book.
Positive & negative aspects of geo-tagging
The positive and negative effects of social media and geo-tagging are clear to see from the previous example but more broadly since 2010, when touristic locations have been able to be accessed on geotagged mapping systems, social media has become a ‘board for opinions’. If a location is not favoured by someone, this message can be spread globally which can affect businesses. This could also work the opposite way around, where if someone finds a positive attribute in a location then social media can spread the news instantly.
