Can we escape the TikTok travel trap?

Secret spots, hidden food stalls and hundreds of other travellers ready to live the same authentically local experience. Welcome to the TikTok era of travel.

While social media can be a great discovery tool, with TikTok being the search engine of choice for Gen Z, it has also trendified travel to the point where it rotates the same type of cafes, hidden gems and quirky photo spots for everyone on the app, no matter where they travel.

And while there’s nothing wrong with getting some inspiration, this constant loop of experiences and places going viral has led to a sanitised version of travel that only creates the illusion of an authentic experience. This often leads to underwhelming experiences and places more strain on local infrastructures than it benefits the communities.

But now that we’re here, can we escape this trendified-travel trap? From an obsession with authenticity, to travelling as a deep transformative experience, we have to understand what led us to this in the first place.

Traveller not tourist

Somewhere along the line of convenient travel, social media, and rising individualism, being a tourist became deeply uncool, at times even shameful.

In his show No Reservations which premiered in 2005 Anthony Bourdain encouraged people to be travellers not tourist by engaging with the place they visit through food, experiences and interactions with locals. But there’s a long way from that to the judging attitude with which we look at tourists today, and more factors are to blame.

On one hand, we have what I previously called the paradox of uniqueness. It’s this loop in which we constantly seek to be unique, but because we operate in the same, usually online, echo chambers, this uniqueness ends up being the same as everyone else’s. Being a tourist inherently means being similar to others, visiting the well-known sights, restaurants and museums, while a traveller is able to find hidden gems or lesser-known spots. In this constant search of uniqueness, being a traveller is much more desirable. 

As this Reddit user very accurately points out: “a tourist is someone who enjoys visiting other places and a traveller is the same but also worried that the locals will realize they’re a tourist,” highlighting how being a traveller has gained some sort of superiority over tourists.

But throw social media in the mix, and everyone is now a traveller on the hunt for the most secret spots. According to a study published by Statista, more than 75% of travellers look online for inspiration, and often document their own travels online. Now we have thousands of TikTok videos and Reels uncovering hidden locations and authentic restaurants all over the world. And naturally, when millions of people are looking these up, they’re not kept a secret for very long.

With these hidden gems being used as a badge of authenticity, they often become more popular and crowded than the so-called tourist spots. In turn, the authentic experience they promised becomes diluted, overrated and slowly transforms these TikTok travellers into the new tourists.

The local cosplayer

A level up from travellers are the local cosplayers. They’re the ones who don’t just seek new experiences but to replicate the exact way locals live, or at least their idea of it, which can often translate into othering the locals and turning them into stereotyped props.

The rise of travel content that focuses on a local experience has developed into a trend in which travellers try to one-up each other on their ‘localness’. This type of content often focuses on reinforcing stereotypes about a place and goes to extremes just to manufacture an authentic experience.

In an entry about this topic, travel blogger Brenontheroad highlights this attitude in their conversations with self-proclaimed travellers in Thailand. “Are you suggesting that all Thai people live without air-conditioning and never eat cheeseburgers,” they say. “Walk into any Burger King in Bangkok, and I assure you it will be packed with Thais eating Whoppers. It will probably be air-conditioned, too.”

They highlight the discrepancy between what these posts portray as local life, and how the locals actually live. While it’s normal that a visitor wants to experience the things he doesn’t know, manufacturing a local experience based on stereotypes makes this type of content feel reductive and minimises meaningful interactions with locals who end up feeling tokenised.

Between escapism and entertainment

But where does this come from? Increasingly after the pandemic, travelling became deeper and often constructed as an escape from daily life.

A study by McCann Worldgroup showed that the escape economy is on the rise, with 82% of Brits believing travelling is the best form of escape. And as Christian Johnson, president of McCann identifies, travelling as escapism “is a mindset that people flow in and out of as they seek escapes of all shapes and sizes,” highlighting the increased obsession with having a unique experience or ‘becoming local’.

And if you’ve been on TikTok at all you’ve probably seen this reflected everywhere from planning to pre-holiday makeovers. ‘Euro summer outfits’ and ‘Japan summer outfits’ are some of the most popular searches related to travel on the app, with countless creators showing you how to upgrade your whole style in order to look more ‘European’ on your holiday.

We all know social media is not always real, but when everyone becomes a travel influencer, it can lead to a diluted and sometimes underwhelming experience. “The camera has shifted, the lens turned, and we’ve put ourselves into the spotlight. We’re the stars, broadcasting an alternative reality to all our fans back home,” identifies Paul S. Marshall in an article about travel entitlement.

Return of the tourist

But now that we’re here, how can we escape this TikTok travel trap? The answer is going back to being a tourist.

What I mean by tourist, in its essence, is going somewhere with a curious mind, a degree of naivety, and an acceptance that not everything is going to be unique, authentic, or perfect. This way, letting go of the pressure to be the most interesting traveller, embrace the imperfect and accept that not every meal is going to be authentic and not every sight is going to be interesting.

At this point, I don’t even believe it’s necessary to make a distinction between tourist and traveller, because they can very well mean the same thing. Destigmatising the word ‘tourist’ is the topic of journalist Paige McClanahan book ‘The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel’ that came out last year. In an interview for the BBC, she also criticised the implied superiority of being a traveller over being a tourist, suggesting that it has a more harmful impact on our experience, as well as social perception in general. “When we think the tourists are over there and I'm over here, that distance doesn't invite any sort of self-reflection,” she says. “We need to elevate our expectations of what it means to be a tourist. And in doing so, we can actually change the way this phenomenon works and the impact it has in the world.”

So next time you travel, and you find yourself competing with people online to have the best experience, you might find it easier to take a step away from curated feeds, place your phone in your bag, and look at your surroundings.