Governing Satisfaction Through Restriction: Operator-Led Self-Governance in Ethical Wildlife Tourism

Wildlife tourism in Thailand operates with limited formal welfare governance, leaving elephant sanctuaries to set and enforce their own animal-welfare restrictions without statutory backing. Whether such restriction-based models can survive commercially is a sustainability question: sanctuaries that prohibit riding, bathing, and forced contact remove the experiences the market historically rewarded, yet depend on visitor satisfaction to fund the welfare standards they impose—the Restriction Paradox. This study examines how operator-led self-governance is associated with sustained expressed visitor satisfaction. Reflexive thematic analysis of 633 user-generated reviews across English-language, Mandarin-language, and Thai-language platform corpora captured platform-mediated discourse, while four expert interviews with Tourism Authority of Thailand officials and sanctuary operators provided institutional and practitioner perspectives. Restriction was not associated with lower expressed satisfaction; platform-communicated rules were associated with ethical appraisal through which reviewers framed constraint as moral value through differentiated narrative pathways across the analyzed language-platform corpora. The study develops the Ethical–Visual Feedback Loop v2 (EVFL v2) to conceptualize this process as a satisfaction-repair mechanism, extending Expectation Disconfirmation Theory to conditions where governance restricts experience. Operator rules and platform amplification appeared to constitute part of the governance architecture operating under limited formal oversight, while the scarcity of Thai-language reviews suggested a comparatively weak domestic governance loop. EVFL v2 positions operator-led self-governance as a potential governance model for under-regulated wildlife tourism, with implications for responsible consumption, wildlife protection, and multi-stakeholder governance (SDGs 12, 15, 17).