Are influencers ruining travel? Their impact can be positive, but sometimes the hype is too much

Serendipity is my guiding principle on the road. It has taken me to unforgettable places, sometimes as the result of intentional aimlessness and sometimes through simple idiocy.

I once got a lengthy bus tour of London that ended in the charming village of Crouch End. I had been trying to get to Trafalgar Square but boarded the double-decker going the wrong direction. Another time I rented a cheap bike in Luang Prabang, Laos, and set off to find a little village where they make paper lanterns. Sixteen kilometres later it seemed clear I had missed the turnoff. And I had, by 15 kilometres. But on that ride I met two tree-climbing children who gave me some tamarind seeds. Later I came upon a sad-looking monkey in a small cage and fed him the tamarind seeds. On the way back, hot and parched, I stopped at a riverside spot for a cold can of Birdy coffee that tasted like the elixir of heaven. I remember that ride far better than I remember the paper lantern village.

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving,” said ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.

Works for me. Getting lost is almost the only way I ever get anywhere.

My wandering strategy is the antithesis of that popular buzz phrase, the bucket list.

A bucket list (i.e. a list of things one must do before kicking the bucket) is not inherently bad. You can put anything on a bucket list, including getting a PhD in microbial ecology or reforming the U.S. prison system. But buckets can be nasty. People do vile things in buckets. As it is commonly applied to tourism, the bucket list approach (a.k.a. 1,000 Places to See Before You Die) encourages the shallowest form of travel — get off the bus, take the selfie, check the box, move on.

Serendipity is the bucket with a hole in it. Wandering is the empty blueprint. There is no bucket, no basket, no navigational app, no discernible strategy. Yet, although the rambling is largely unplanned there is still a search going on — a search for the surprising, the entrancing, the sublime.

Sublimery is what you’re after. Don’t let spell-check tell you that’s not a word.

Serendipity has its limits of course. I prize spontaneity so much that I frequently miss out on seeing the most exalted wonders and tour book attractions, simply because I cannot bear the thought of climbing onto a packed shuttle bus and then shuffling shoulder-to-shoulder, or worse, past the Thing to Be Seen.

Serendipity can be a fickle force. It is first cousin to chaos. Serendipity is a bitey cat that purrs until the very second you feel claws raking your hand. I try to avoid the claws; before a journey I generally plan transport and accommodation carefully. Unless you are on a random road trip there is no fun to be had scrambling for a last-minute bed. The serendipity kicks in after the basic necessities have been taken care of. French novelist Gustave Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Travel is like that too. First get your ducks in a row so that later you can take wing.

How common is my approach? Hard to know. But my own unscientific observations suggest the current trend in travel does not favour serendipity. Rather it appears to take its cue from Instagram. Social media influencers have become a major force in the travel industry. Instagram and TikTok are inundated with their carefully chosen pictures and video. While some tourists are merely sharing images from their travels (I do it myself), many others monetize their social media accounts to become professional travellers.

The old invite-your-friends-to-watch-a-travel-slideshow routine has morphed into a viable career path.

Dr. Ulrike Gretzel is a senior research fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for Public Relations. She says modern social media influencers represent more of an evolution than an innovation.

“Word of mouth has always been super important in travel,” Gretzel says. “Even before the rise of social media, bulletin boards and forums like Thorntree forum, VirtualTourist and Tripadvisor emerged, in which members contributed content, moderated discussions and answered questions.”

“As far as the industry is concerned, influencers constitute a new stakeholder,” Gretzel says. “They have added a new marketing channel that allows for more precise targeting. Influencers are also critical for translating messages for audiences the industry doesn’t know how to communicate with, and they help tourism marketers enter platforms like TikTok and live streaming.

During COVID, influencers were very important for communicating about travel restrictions and requirements.”

Gretzel doesn’t feel all social media influencers deserve to be lumped together. “It really depends on the type of influencer,” she says. “There are plenty of sustainable and responsible travel influencers out there who try to change the way people travel in positive ways. There’s one for every type of travel, from digital nomads and vanlifers, to cruise travel, sustainable travel, travelling with kids, gluten-free travel, yoga travel, female solo travel, luxury travel and so on.”

When I suggest to Dr. Gretzel that Instagram and TikTok might encourage the sort of take-a-selfie-and-get-out travel I dislike, she demurs.

“I don’t think shallow travel is the problem,” she says. “It’s the stupid challenges and culturally insensitive, environmentally questionable, ethically problematic or simply dangerous things that influencers do and promote that I am concerned about.”

But Gretzel sees many positives to the social media influencer movement.

“They have helped inspire people who might not think they can travel, or travel in a certain way,” she points out. “They often call out unacceptable industry practices. They help show sides of destinations that travel agents might not advertise because there is no money to be made. They also provide information for niche markets that the industry doesn’t serve or doesn’t serve well enough, like LGBTQ+, disability, neurodiversity, Black travellers, people with dietary needs, etc.

Gretzel sees other potentially negative aspects to the influencer phenomenon.

“They can create a hype around a destination that can lead to capacity problems or other issues,” she says. “For instance, the Schlegeis (suspension) bridge near the Olpererhütte in the Tyrolean Zillertal (in Austria) was frequently portrayed by influencers and is now completely overrun, causing huge traffic problems in the area, environmental degradation, plus accidents because Instagram tourists don’t realize how challenging the climb is.”

As someone who has written about travel, and on occasion gained financial assistance from a sponsor or tourism board, I have little moral standing to criticize professional influencers. Yet I still fear the travel culture some influencers promote. Their growing impact seems to me reminiscent of the upsurge in online sports betting, where an onslaught of advertising has often served to transform pro sports from a primarily fan-based culture to a more predatory gambling industry. The profit motive tends to consume wonder and simple enthusiasm.

I feel the prominence of influencers, bucket lists and online recommendations serves to distort an essential truth of travel — that it is, to some degree, unquantifiable.

Travel is not a package one opens to consume the expected contents and then rate thumbs up or thumbs down.

For me the random quality of travel extends even to my return home. There is an involuntary serendipity that takes hold after the journey ends — the serendipity of memory.

I can never predict which moments will resurface after the fact, which experiences will retroactively reveal themselves to have been the most powerful. It is almost never some particular attraction, or anything that could be posted online. Recollections are often of random occurrences or unexpected bursts of emotion. Other experiences rise to the surface when the white noise of consciousness fades. Perhaps you were distracted at the time but looking back you marvel at a fleeting moment of wonder.

On my most recent Asian trip I had to get to Bangkok’s Don Mueang International Airport at an ungodly hour, and spent many a moment calculating the best way to get there on my dwindling cash reserves. Come flight day I was humping a heavy gym bag up the steps at the BTS station at 5:15 a.m., then making connections one after another. The stress did not abate until I was safely on board my flight.

So it was only in hindsight I recalled the moment I disembarked from the train at Mo Chit Station and dragged my bag down the stairs to the bus stop to find a group of morning commuters being serenaded by a DJ working a light show and spinning an electro version of “Achy Breaky Heart.”

Only in Bangkok.

Excerpt from “Reservations: The Pleasures & Perils of Travel” by Steve Burgess  (Douglas & McIntyre, copyright 2024). Reprinted with permission by the publisher.