“Stop trying to be an influencer, stop trying to get the same shot as everyone else, and for the love of god, stop making lists!”
I hate the Travel Content Industrial Complex.
The late, great Anthony Bourdain once said, “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” Since he passed away in 2018, I wonder if he could have anticipated how little travelers in 2024 aspire for that unknown.
These days, Gen Z and millennial travel is all about uncritically aping what we see on TikTok and Reels. As in other cultural realms (like menswear) the limited parameters of bite-sized, short-form vertical video have had a profound flattening effect on where we choose to travel — and what we choose to do when we’re there. For all their innate beauty, Dubrovnik, Santorini, and Kyoto have become borderline passé backdrops. The streets of Bali are bursting at the seams. The insufferably smug Brooklyn-to-Mexico City pipeline is a legitimate border crisis. And let us not even speak on Dubai.
It’s not as simple as “overtourism is bad.” Beyond the obvious environmental and social tolls of American neo-colonialism, consider what’s changing behaviorally as centuries-old civilizations are collapsed into thousands of undistinguishable Instagram carousels and “MUST-VISIT X IN Y COUNTRY” reels created by under-informed people who’ve been in the country for less than 2 weeks. I see more and more people cobbling together the same exact itineraries of basic-bitch photoshoot opps, restaurants from deeply unserious Michelin lists, and vaguely sceney downtown spots that could be plopped down into a downtown anywhere. And the more the algorithm optimizes towards superficial consensus around #travelporn things that look pretty on a screen, the more vicious this cycle becomes.
Maybe checklist travel is more efficient, but whatever happened to real fun? Whatever happened to eat, pray, love beyond its bastardization as a go-to IG caption? The prospect of genuine discovery is at an all time low. Like Bourdain suggests, there’s meaning in seeking the unknown. There’s an art to going in blind enough to be open-minded, striking up conversation with locals in a bar, and exploring the town Midnight in Paris-style with them. Personally speaking, none of my best travel memories have come from the things I over-planned based on a TikTok I saw — more have come from the spontaneous, the meet-cutes, the places not on Google Maps. In its current form, travel is being robbed of its ability to teach us to think and act differently than we would at home.
I’d point out that “knowing” exactly where to go hasn’t made everyone’s vacations all that much better either. TravelTok is a carnival of unmanaged and unmet expectations. Just ask the influencers going viral for not realizing they had to haul their luggage up all those steps in Oia, or the girlies crying because Parisians weren’t as welcoming as they wanted them to be. Your experience is never going to live up to that thing you saw on social media. You all do know this, right? Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.
So how did we get here? It might have all started with Iceland. Think back to the mid-2010s, when at any given moment, there were more Blue Lagoon-bound tourists than natives on the island. At the time, it was all about Big Tourism buying out the travel media industry. Like Miranda Priestly making cerulean a thing, the trendiest destinations were hand-selected for you by a small group of people with lots of PR dollars on the table.
It’s only gotten worse: pretty much everyone writing for the big glossies like Travel & Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler now is suckling at the teat of media trips with business class flights and five-star hotels. (I’ll admit I’m wont to bend the knee). The New York Times travel desk allegedly prohibits its writers from accepting freebies, but then again we’ve all seen them on our trips…
Still, traditional travel media will always cater to a very specific demographic — so the impact of that industry is more contained. It’s the more recent advent of Instagram and TikTok — where anyone, qualified or not, can be a travel influencer— and the general over-saturation of simpleminded SEO-juiced Travel Content on websites like say, Insider, that is blowing a handful of places up faster and to even larger audiences who often lack both the finances and cultural vernacular to be representing America abroad.
Tl;dr: If you’ve just parachuted into a country for the first time, why would you be so arrogant to believe that you should be influencing anyone on where to go? Why wouldn’t you be spending more time trying to be present, immersing yourself, and getting to know the soul of a place? Stop trying to be an influencer, stop trying to get the same shot as everyone else, and for the love of god, stop making lists! Not only do you do everyone a massive disservice by acting like you know what you’re talking about, you also limit your own ability to be challenged and, god forbid, changed by your experience. It’s time to step away from the Google Doc, and use your eyeballs for once.
—Jonathan Swift
Yes! When I was growing up in the 90s and told people I wanted to travel when I got older, it was always met with indifference or even a sort of gentle contempt. In the pre-social media days, traveling was a niche hobby, and attracted roughly the same number of people who read regularly, or play a musical instrument in adulthood. Without social media, it would only appeal to a narrow segment of the population. I wish there was some way to turn back the clock—for the sake of the planet and those of us who really do love travel.
Yes can we apply this everything? Like why did every ‘healthy’ snack a few months ago contain rice cakes? And why is everyone talking about protein? And loafers? It's like groundhog day.