Travel Influencer Phenomenon

George Bernard Shaw once said “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”. Well, some people took it literally and decided to become so called content creators. They post daily on their Instagram or Facebook, or TikTalk or whatever accounts they have and give us the idea that we know everything about them. They basically create this whole new person just for social media purposes. The most successful ones are lucky enough to call themselves ‘the influencers’.

These days there are many kinds of influencers on social media. Fashion, fitness, food or even pets are great subjects that could help you become Instagram famous. What's definitely on top of the 'influencer list' is travel. Who doesn't like to travel? Who doesn't love looking at amazing pictures from Tokyo or Bali? For most of us posting travel pictures on Instagram full time is only a dream but for some people it's an actual job. We see their perfect photos from another day of their perfect lives and we start feeling bad about ours. After years of following many travel influencers I can say one thing for sure, their content isn't real. Why? I'll try to answer this question in my essay while investigating the phenomenon of travel influencers.

I’d like to stress that we need to remember one and the most important thing. This does not apply to every single travel influencer. It’s impossible for me to know all of them or to write about every single one of them. However, I’ll try to be as objective and detailed as possible.

Let’s start with the types of travel influencers. If you’re not much into this whole social media thing you might have no idea that there are different kinds of them. To split them into 4 main groups I’d say that we have solo, couple, family travelers and collective accounts that only repost what’s already out there. See, before I split them into groups I did not notice the rule that seems to apply to many of them. Once I did that, I’ve noticed that most solo and family travel influencers post a lot of content that speaks about their hardships, issues, how they got to the place they are at, etc. They seem to be a bit more relatable because they are more personal in what they put on their accounts.

Let’s start with solo creators. There are so many of them and that’s probably the most diverse group of all. Still, I definitely see more and more ‘real issues’ on my Instagram feed and usually they’re the ones delivering that kind of content. For example, Eva Zu Beck is an influencer who I discovered recently and I was overwhelmed with how much ‘real’ content I’ve seen from her so far. Just within the last couple of months she went to places like Albania, Macedonia, Pakistan, Egypt and Tanzania. Instead of seeing pyramids in Egypt she was recording a documentary video on Cairo's ‘Trash City’, Mukattam. In my eyes she’s an impersonification of my favorite quote “I haven’t been everywhere but it’s on my list”. She inspires me every day.

Recently Eva also posted a very personal story about how she got married at the age of 24 and ended up being stuck in an unhappy relationship. She’s a person that currently I look up to the most because just like me, she’s Polish and I got married very young as well. Just like her I have a huge passion for traveling. I’m sure that there’s more girls like me that look up to Eva but that’s the point. Whether the influencers like it or not, they affect other people. They can inspire them or put them down. I don’t know her and I probably never will but she inspired me to follow my passion. While I see that her pictures are edited, she’s being completely honest that she shows to people only a very small part of her journey. Many times she has stressed the importance of not believing anything we see on social media. She mentioned multiple times that she loves switching off the camera and keeping some moments to herself. While her content is most certainly selected and edited, I have no doubts that it serves its purpose. It inspires and teaches people about the world that we live in, about places that we wouldn’t be able to explore on our own. She’s an influencer in the truest form.

After looking into a lot of solo traveler profiles I’ve noticed that many of them love sharing ‘behind the scenes’ and add long meaningful descriptions to the photos they post. There are also so called travelers who are mainly visiting places like New York, London or wherever and while their pictures look great, there’s no story behind them. A lot of times they are girls in pretty dresses who focus more on their outfits than what’s actually around them. Personally, while traveling I’ve seen a few examples of these girls. Those girls hike in dresses or heels.No matter what temperature is outside, they always seem to be perfectly warm in their strapless dresses (even during Christmas Time at the Rockefeller Center). They’ll always get a perfect picture no matter how miserable it makes them.

Still, I’d say that there are more positive examples of travel influencers meaning some travelling families. Within the last few years I’ve seen some many of them. They decided to leave their lives behind and travel the world with their children. While their pictures are obviously amazing, very often they share content on how difficult it is to travel with kids, what kind of mistakes they’ve made as parents, etc. Some African- American families post a lot about difficulties of traveling as black people and what it means for them and their children. Those parents even if we think they’re crazy for turning their family lives into a social media account… they’re the ones who are most noble, humble and informative on my feed. I’ve learnt a lot from following them. However, would I ever make my kids Instagram famous before they even know what social media is or know the dangers of it? Most certainly not. Still it’s my personal opinion.

To be honest, the group I’ve always had an incredibly hard time relating to was the couple travelers and it was for one specific reason: they just seemed too perfect. Some people might say it’s because my life is boring and I can’t appreciate how amazing it is to be in such an adventurous and beautiful relationship while traveling the world… Well, maybe I’d agree with that before I got married but then I did and realized that while traveling as a couple is romantic and all… it’s definitely not perfect. It’s incredibly hard to travel with another person and spend 24 hours a day with them. Not only that but even if I absolutely love taking photos and my husband doesn’t mind helping me out with them, he definitely is not very eager to pose with me. The question is: what men are? The idea of a guy who’ll be doing photoshoots with you for hours just to post it on your joint travel account is the most unrealistic of all. Of course there are men who don’t mind or maybe even enjoy it, I see them on my Instagram feed all the time but to most of us getting a few cute pictures with our husbands throughout a whole trip would be a success. Seeing those photos of a couple in the middle of the waterfall, caught up in a passionate kiss… We all know it’s not real! Yet, let’s be honest, we all wish it was.

About a year ago (or more) one of the solo travelers I followed posted a picture of him proposing to a girl. I automatically liked it because it was a nice picture. Didn’t give it much of a thought. However, the next day he posted an update of how that one picture got over 150% more likes than any other of his pictures. He explained that it was a staged photo and that the girl was his good friend. He wanted to see if the ‘couple travelers’ are actually more successful based strictly on their romantic photos and he was right, that picture got him way more attention than anything else that he had posted before. Now when I think about it, it seems kind of ridiculous that people liked his fake picture more than the real ones. Of course, they couldn’t know it wasn’t real but it definitely proves a point that we cannot believe anything we see on Instagram. It seems like no matter how many times everyone says that, people still don’t get it.. or they do but they don’t mind being lied to.

The couple travelers are the best examples of how idealized some social media content is. I’ve been following some of them and one thing I can tell you for sure, I’ve never heard any of them talking about their relationship issues. While it’s absolutely their right not to share it with others, it’s also their choice to show people their life as this never ending fairytale. They seem always so happy and in love and anyone that has ever been in a real relationship knows that it’s simply impossible. They don’t just edit their photos or select the best ones. They choose to show their lives in a specific way that is very unrealistic. While it’s nice to look at their photos the truth is that they don’t bring anything meaningful to the Internet or social media.

On top of that we’ve got the collective travel accounts that repost pictures of the travel influencers. This type of accounts focuses on amazing pictures (fully edited of course) and barely ever tells the story behind them. Again, it’s great to scroll through their feed and dream of swimming with turtles in Galapagos but besides making us feel hopeful that one day it will be us who go there… There’s no reason why they exist. They just support the influencers in reaching more audiences and post photos that are incredibly edited. They would never accept my plain photos that have never seen photoshop before. They don’t want real, they want stunning and breathtaking which apparently equals edited.

Eva Zu Beck asked: “why do you follow travel creators?” I commented below her post: “Inspiration, motivation, learning something new about the world we live in” . However, after writing this post I realized that many of the accounts that I follow don’t bring any of that into my life. They’re just nice pictures that we all would enjoy looking at. All of them are staged and some even photoshopped. Couples are caught off guard in the middle of a proposal on the rooftop of Turkish cafe in Cappadocia (I swear, I’m not making this up). We all know this kind of content is not real. We are smarter than that. Are we though? For some reason we crave these unrealistic posts on our feeds. We follow all the influencers and press the little heart to show our appreciation for them. Thanks to us they get to travel the world and the hotels even pay them to stay there. Why do we follow travel creators? ‘Inspiration, motivation…’ and most certainly for an illusion of a perfect life that doesn’t exist outside of social media.