When travel blogging became a thing, I was just about to take the big “digital nomad” leap. That was only a couple of years ago – back in 2014 or so. Twenty-somethings with good degrees, good positions but finding no meaning in their life, started to blog about the countries they visited after quitting their jobs. Selling everything they owned and setting out to travel the world in search of better experiences. Coincidentally, that was also the rise of social media, so we had the motivation, the information and the platform. The convergence of purpose and easy digital means was so powerful, so exciting, so inspiring for travellers that we became a web community – for travel has bonded us together forever.
But first-hand travel tips are dead
In the following years, digital trends converged into the birth of a very professional travel blogosphere. We saw the validation of travel bloggers who created content that travel agencies should have been creating. Since the tourism industry was deeply digitally backwards, the Internet of travel was an intergalactic void (and somehow, it still is: more than 80% travel companies don’t even promote their activities online today, according to Phocuswright, 2016). Even the great Lonely Planet guides online were very difficult to manoeuvre – and there’s still room for improvement. As a matter of fact, the only efficient, easy-to-handle, online travel guides were blog articles compiled together.
The strongest element of the age of online recommendation? First-hand travel advice. We loved it. Why? Because, as mass tourism boomed, people were finally explaining how to travel. You could learn about the quality of a hotel in Bombay or a trail to Machu Picchu without even moving from your sofa. More than this: you could prepare your trip with the traveller. Pick the blogger with the aspirations closest to yours, follow in their footsteps, make yours the places they see, the food they eat, the air they breathe. Of course, book the places they book. And dream the dreams they dream.
And thus, travel bloggers became online travel guides, travel brand ambassadors and travel marketing consultants all at once. They were no longer writing for friends and family: they were running a business, and one tourism pros needed badly. Let’s remember the time when “influence” was still an organic concept yet to be defined: you could easily get freebies just by mentioning the French Tourist Board on your instinctively curated social platforms, along with the #GotoFrance hashtag. You were genuinely travelling, and could still be a bit faithful about your trips in your writings. People’s minds and Facebook-scrolling capacities aren’t unlimited, in case you were wondering. A saturated market means the golden age of travel blogging, as a peer recommendation system granting truthful exclusive information, is long gone.
Fake is beautiful
Travel blogging has been undergoing a troubling change. I used to seek recommendations online and look up Google images to see what the Giant’s Causeway or the Buddha of Leshan looked like. Now all I do is scrolling my Instagram and bend down to its algorithm. Which leads me exactly to the same places as everyone. If you’re a travel enthusiast and seek inspiration online, you fairly know what I’m talking about. You also know that most famous influencers are not “just” bloggers, they are photographers, video makers, “content creators”, “visual storytellers”, don’t you?
The rise of mobile visual social media here in the Western world – YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat – has completely transformed the face of the Internet of travel: shifting from online text guidebooks to “inspirational” Instagram accounts. Welcome to the stories you’re telling through your nicest pics only, through the videos your audience will share and remember to share with their friends… Welcome to being fed only the content that translates well onto social media. If you scroll the travel bloggers’ Facebook groups, you’ll notice that some of the required basic skills to emerge out there are to know how to shoot a movie that could be selected at Sundance, act like a model in front of your pro photographer’s camera and, of course, fly a drone (Also, the GoPro is so 2014. Just saying).
Beautiful, inspiring… dream-selling. But selling nevertheless. If you want to actually travel blog today, good luck finding a deal that will let you write and shoot what you want. Not only are you competing with hundreds of travellers and travel companies producing their own content, but you’re also subjected to the communities’ hunger for über-beautiful visual content only (thank youuuu Instagram). Many travel bloggers have started to back out, digital nomads have mentioned the “travel burnout” – 1st world problems? Definitely. But quite accurate to what we’ve done to the art of travelling: we brought it down to a media cash-machine. This industry made of beautiful travellers has legitimately led to some questioning the reality of what was said and exhibited (see here an interesting boycott statement of a former travel blogger).
All this has led me to wonder: is that it? Is that what the 1st generation of travel bloggers set out to do when they started writing about their travels? Are we actually helping or even still inspiring anyone? Where yesterday the simple act of sharing itinerary tips across Peru was helping people to get out in the world, admire an amazing sunrise on Lake Titicaca with their own eyes after a 24h bus drive, we’re today only looking at pictures we save in our Instagram collections in order to mark where our next photoshoot will take place. Is this what we want to be remembered for, as travellers, and as writers?
Travelers, where would we be, if not for our encounters
So, what should we tell aspiring travel bloggers? How can they still make it? Can they, really? We said bye to genuine travel tips, hello-goodbye to “follow-me-to” pictures. If I look among my fellow traveller community, I’d just say the next bet for travel bloggers should be to reconnect with the human. And by that, I mean not only the travellers’ inner quest for personal meaning. We’ve had enough of the enlightened nomadic yoga teacher who found the truth in a monastery in India (hold on, was her name Julia and didn’t she star in a pretty stereotypical movie called Eat, Pray, Love?). I mean actual human stories, telling readers about genuine bonds travellers make through their journeys, genuine obstacles (restore the backpacker’s truth!) and genuine lives.
Many of us are tired of self-centred odysseys. Maybe we’ve been a bit jealous, I’m not excluding this idea. But then, that’s also a reason why things can and should move. When a community’s frustrations and desires push through. Some of us have already started to imagine collaborative ways of creating content, beyond just crowdsourcing for beautiful content – there is a nascent trend among travel storytellers, that we could dub “crowd-linking”. It could be sensed as the comeback of the initial spirit of travel communities like Couchsurfing (before it became the occasional dating app, lol): meet, share, enjoy, maybe document, but meet and share first. We crave faces, hands, hearts. Isn’t that why we started travelling in the first place?
People want true stories, the ones they’ve slowly been deprived of by the sexy self-centred traveller. Back to our basic enjoyment of honest voyeurism: no more full-text guidebooks, no more beautiful luxury hotel shootings, we only want stories of meaningful encounters and fate-changing talks. We want real people. In the age of 5G, the power of travel content creators may now very well be in their abilities to use snaps, stories and other live features right on the spot to document their real life. Maybe we’re done with over-edited insta stories. Show me your real-time experiences, and couple them with a good old travel story on Medium so I know what you’ve learnt from your encounters and how you’ve truly felt besides “amazed by the sunset”. You might feel stupid at the beginning, but if you really want to talk to people, talk honestly.
Dear travel blogger to be,
I’d like you to tell stories about that smile you exchanged with a stranger, that turned into a friendly lunch two days later, a day-trip to some remote temple in the mountains the following week and eventually let you embark on a longer trip to India a year later, to attend the wedding of that very friend you made one fine day at a random train station in Kuala Lumpur. Tell the world out there that this is not a movie. This is what happens in real life when you start travelling. Talk about the journey, not the destination. Tell tales of authentic adventures, in which the journey is not that of a single person opening a window to their own world, but one of a person in flesh and bones who reaches to a thousand other human beings.
Talk about people. They pave our journey with meaning. They are the ones who lead us to our better self. Not the landscapes, not the transports, and not your Instagram pictures (well maybe the people who take your Instagram pictures, occasionally). Talk about how your trip to the Iguazu Falls taught you about the power one has over one’s own life and the courage that can be deployed to escape death, thanks to a Polish girl you met there who opened your eyes (I would like to tell you this story myself, but you’d be in for another good 30-minute read). What I’d like to tell you, dear travel blogger is to take a deep breath and realise that travel blogging is not so much about explaining how to pack smart or make people dream impossible lives. It’s about being able to relate to any human being who crosses your way, listen to their stories and share how they helped you write your own. Go back to the roots of travel writing: create inspiration, not envy. You’ve never been closer to the power of changing minds through your wanderings.