Before traveling to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, I knew practically nothing about either country. To me, they were just Central Asian post-Soviet countries. If you had asked me about either one, I probably would have said something vague about yurts, nomads, and the USSR. I’m sure most of my friends and family’s responses would be similar. This lack of knowledge and more importantly, lack of impression, is exactly what many post-Soviet “-stans” are working against.
After having been in Kazakhstan for six weeks, we embarked on our Uzbekistan trip. During our 10 days, we were fortunate to travel throughout the country and visit various historic cities. We visited Tashkent, Nukus, Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand. We saw quite a bit of the country and many, many other tourists. This was surprising because back home, I had never heard of a person traveling to Uzbekistan for vacation. It’s quite far and, as I said before, the general impression of all Central Asian countries is lacking. However, Uzbekistan’s government is working hard to promote tourism as a vital part of their developing economy (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). Many post-Soviet countries, Uzbekistan included, are working hard to create an individual destination image for themselves and open themselves up to the rest of the world (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021).
Uzbekistan receives hundreds of thousands of tourists each year (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). The countries who send the most tourists to Uzbekistan are Russia, Turkey, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the USA (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). We mostly noticed Russian and German tourists during our travels. The impression that these tourists obtain and the photos they post are the building blocks for Uzbekistan’s tourism economy. A study published in 2018, explored the types of pictures that inform a potential tourist’s impression of Uzbekistan. They separated the photos into 2 categories: destination marketing organizations (DMOs), which are photos put onto the web by travel companies or government agencies, and user-generated content photos (UGCs), which are photos from Instagram posted by tourists. Interestingly, the content of these photos differed significantly.
One of the main differences that the study found between the quantity of DMO images and UGC images was in the amount of historic buildings pictured. In the DMO group, only 18% of heritage/sightseeing photos were of architecture, whereas 24% of the UGC photos were photos of architecture (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). The article explains that this could be due to tourists wanting to capture the uniqueness of Uzbekistan’s architecture (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). While I agree that the architectural structures are quite photo worthy, I believe that the colorful decoration of the madrassas and minarets make them ideal for aesthetic posts, regardless of the rest of the building, which could explain why they are more numerous on Instagram than in DMO documents.
Another very interesting difference between DMO images and UGC images was in how they showcased Uzbekistan’s natural land. UGC images were made up of 26% nature photos, whereas the DMO images were made up of only 3% nature photos (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). Here, we can conclude that the government and travel agencies are not trying to showcase Uzbekistan’s natural land and beauty. The beauty clearly exists, as evidenced by the amount of Instagram pictures of the mountains and deserts. One explanation that the article brought up is that the government likely doesn’t want to highlight the environmental disaster history of the Aral Sea (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). I agree with this point as reasoning for why they would not highlight the land of the former Aral Sea, but it doesn’t explain the overall difference in the amount of natural spaces pictured between DMOs and UGCs. This difference could be due to lack of tourism infrastructure around the natural spaces. Perhaps there aren’t many established hikes in tourist areas, so there aren’t specific experiences to advertise.
While I haven’t yet posted on Instagram about my travels, I have chosen the ten Uzbekistan pictures that I want to post eventually. Using the categories from the aforementioned study, I divided up my own pictures. Out of my 10 pictures, I had the most photos in the architectural features category (three), followed by historical buildings and deserts (two each), and lastly cuisine and plants/animals (one each). I was surprised to realize that my top percentages lined up pretty well with the data from the study. In the study the top two Instagram categories were architectural features with 24.34% and historical buildings with 17.11% (Fayzullaev, et al., 2021). Both of these statistics are quite similar to my post’s content. I imagine that, just like other tourists, I was drawn to the pictures of architecture by the bright colors and patterns that they included. They ended up dominating my post, possibly because they stood out against the desert landscape photos that I also took. In fact, I took more desert pictures than architecture pictures, but I ended up posting more pictures of the pretty architecture than of the relatively monotonous desert landscape.
After visiting Uzbekistan, I can confidently say that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are incredibly different. Especially in the way that they market themselves to tourists. So how is it that back home most people don’t even know the difference between the two? Perhaps it takes time for a concrete destination image to take hold or maybe Americans just don’t care to learn about the individuality of Central Asian countries. Either way, my eventual instagram post and all of the pictures I share will help a destination image for Uzbekistan take hold in the minds of my friends and family. According to the article, my post will fit right into the rest of Instagram’s impression of Uzbekistan.
Works Cited:
Fayzullaev, Kamoliddin, Susanna Heldt Cassel, and Daniel Brandt. 2021. “Destination Image in Uzbekistan – Heritage of the Silk Road and Nature Experience as the Core of an Evolving Post Soviet Identity.” The Service Industries Journal 41 (7–8): 446–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2018.1519551.
