For Sarah Archer, a 27-year-old from the Boston area who works as a content marketing manager, travel shaming gave her"a pit in my stomach" during recent travels in Europe -- and even served to shape some of her behaviors.
Archer said she is doing her best throughout her travels to do everything safely and legally. She wrote a Medium article about how she managed to enter Europe and shared posts on her Instagram account -- where she knows all of her followers -- and was surprised to receive direct messages from a few friends asking whether she really needed to be traveling right now.
"It's really as if things are normal in Switzerland now," says Archer."But coming from the US and knowing how this has affected people personally makes me more cognizant. As a long-term traveler and being on social media while in these countries, too, I feel responsibility not to get and not to spread it."
And while the evidence for the effectiveness of shaming is mixed, says Thomason, it does work in some cases. "I'd been locked in my apartment, on Zoom and on the phone, pretty much the whole time," she says."I reached the point where I just needed to go somewhere." "I'd seen photos on the Internet of crowded pools and beaches and was like, 'Shame on those people,'"she says."Then here I was in the same situation. The photos I did post from Atlantic City, I didn't want to show people in them because most people weren't wearing masks and I didn't want to be associated with them.
"It was the best thing I could've done for my mental health," according to Abbamonte, who has traveled around the US several times since and recently returned from Mexico. According to Thomason, confusion around rules and norms -- including as they relate to travel and what many of us are experiencing during the pandemic -- can affect both how people shame on social media as well as how effective that shaming is.
"As long as you're following the rules, you shouldn't have to feel self-conscious about it," he says."But I know people are, because I definitely was."Loyalty points and travel expert Gary Leff of View from the Wing said in an August column that travel shaming has"dropped substantially compared to late March and April," but that people continue to fear posting on sites such as Instagram because of potential backlash.
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