(no subject)

[tvordlj]

Over the summer on various social media outlets I've been seeing photos and information about how abusive the practice of tourists riding elephants is. Training them is often cruel and then they are overworked, treated badly and often end up dying from exhaustion. THey are often uncared for, not fed well, live in restrained and often unsafe or unclean conditions. Elephants are very social animals within their herd and these ones tend to be isolated from each other. It makes for unhappy, unhealthy and badly treated animals.

Rocketmiles is a booking website affiliated with Air Canada's Aeroplan reward program. (probably affiliated with others, too). You can get lots of extra points if you book using the Rocketmiles site.

There's a connection.
Yesterday, I logged in just to look around, put in some searches. On the very first search I tried, while the search engine was chugging away, a promotional "flash" ads came up. It's the kind of thing that tells you about other customers and their reward acheivements or goals in order that you, too, may be inspired to book using Rocketmiles. The very first one that came up had something to do with a customer that was saving miles to ride elephants in Chang Mai. My eyebrows skidded upwards. Right away I started looking for the "contact us" link. It took some doing but I found it, and there was a form to fill out. The description didn't really leave a lot of room so instead of being more descriptive and polite, I entered a quick, somewhat abrupt message about the ad promoting the abuse of elephants, something I'd been seing all over social media lately.

Guess what? They got back to me in a few hours. Twice. The first message:

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your feedback with us. We have shared your feedback with our marketing team and trust that you understand our promotional campaigns are certainly not meant to promote any misconduct of animals.

Kind regards,

And then the second a couple of hours after:

Thank you for contacting Rocketmiles.

We just wanted to let you know that we truly appreciated your feedback on our promotion and the marketing team is working on removing that suggestion from our site. As you know, we certainly would not want our customers to feel as though we are promoting any type of misconduct of animals.

Thanks again for reaching out and we hope that you are able to book with us in the future!

Kind regards,

I'm impressed. I hope it's true. Seems like it might be. Both messages were more than just a form letter response which makes me think they're taking it seriously.