Impact of Instagram influencers on tourism stakeholders in Nepal

This thesis analyses how the destination of Nepal is represented by influencers using Instagram, with much emphasis on the intersection of the influencer’s origin and gender. As one of the main sources of income in Nepal, tourism is becoming increasingly dependent on digital tools for visibility and consumer engagement. Being a visual, interactive medium, Instagram allows influencers to present destinations in the form of images, text, sounds or performance, which supports audience engagement and as sense of connection between local and international travellers. Nonetheless, very little scholarly work has been done to analyse how influencers portray Nepal in terms of gender and origin. The project involves the qualitative content analysis of representations of Nepal from nine Instagram influencers (five domestic to Nepal, and four international opinion leaders) representative of both males and females, as well of both domestic and international origin status.The data to be analysed will include nine Instagram Reels created between January 2022 and March 2025 that mention any portion of Nepal as a tourist destination. The analytic method combines Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose) and Jewitt’s Multimodal Analysis to decipher narrative motives introduced in the visual, textual, and auditory modes of representation. The results indicate that influencers can largely shape the destination image of Nepal through hybrid storytelling, which is a mixture of self-branding and destination advertising. International influencers portray visiting Nepal as a transformative and aesthetic adventure, spiritually and culturally interest-based, whereas local influencers portray Nepal’s relatability, local culture and national pride. The tone of affection and degree of closeness in the narrative and visual representations, can be seen as differing between the genders. The female influencers are more emotional and cultural than the male influencers, who are more about adventure, power and performance. This thesis offers implications to the digital tourism theory that, shows, influencer origin and gender function as narrative position to construct multimodal destination meaning making, which reflects dramatist and multimodal models to understand how influencer shape destination image. This thesis can be considered an important contribution to the academic literature on tourism since up until now, the voices of both women and men, and of both home and foreign origin, have not been systematically examined in the same case study of the Nepalese tourism industry. The study fills these gaps to expand the theoretical knowledge of influencer marketing in under- researched destinations. The results of the research are likely to be applicable to a broad range of tourism stakeholders in Nepal, as well as other destination. The government agencies, hotels and tour operators in Nepal as well as Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) are gradually, though progressively, considering the idea of using influencers as an affordable option in marketing strategies.