By sometimes over-popularizing certain confidential tourist sites, Instagram, like other social networks, has also contributed to making them more disappointing than if they had ever been. Between tourist overdose, excessive aesthetic expectations and desperate quest for likes, analysis of a phenomenon that is gangrening our travels at high speed.
“We’ve all become travel influencers and it’s destroying the planet.” Set against an ocean blue background, the punchline has the false air of militant declarations.
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Instagram, the world’s first travel agency
And for good reason, with more than 2.5 billion monthly active users (source: HubSpot / Mention, 2023), the social network which initially consisted of posting aesthetically pleasing photos of one’s daily life (and vacations) has become in less than two decades the leading travel agent in the entire world, or at least for its most connected inhabitants: young people.
According to a 2017 study of British people aged 18 to 33, 40% of them cited the “Instagrammability” of a destination as one of the main criteria when choosing their holiday destination.
A follow-up survey of Gen Z also found that “the number of views and likes their vacation videos are likely to generate on TikTok” was one of the biggest factors when choosing where they’ll jet off to next.
In other words: the travelers interviewed would go to destination X or Y less because of their free will than because of the attraction aroused by a slightly photoshopped photograph that they themselves wish to reproduce (all in a concern for social validation that the said travelers rarely admit to themselves).
Mimicry and tourist overdose
And yet, this superficial and meaningless quest for travel is not the worst consequence of the Meta group’s stranglehold on our lives. Because whoever says “instagrammization” of the travel sector inevitably says visual overexposure of certain destinations which, with the help of filters and careful shots, attract more and more visitors each year to the point of bordering on saturation.
If sites like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Machu Pichu in Peru or the canals of Venice did not wait for Instagram to flirt with tourist overdose, others – more confidential – are victims of the phenomenon of mimicry inherent in all Instagram trends.
This is what the account says InstaRepeat demonstrates with some eloquence, by putting side by side the photos of the same site published on Instagram. Indeed, no need to be Einstein to understand that, the more a destination, a place, a historical monument is seen on social networks, the more those who are exposed to it will want to go there to take exactly the same photo and exhibit it on their own profile, especially if the said place turns out to be particularly photogenic.
This is the case of Chefchaouen, this famous Moroccan blue city which, with more than 445,000 tags this year, is officially considered the most Instagrammable in the country… and therefore the new place to be. Unless the reality on the ground turns out to be quite different.
“Instagram vs. reality”
And for good reason, by attracting more new visitors than ever, some of these sites with a certain charm find themselves drowned by an overpopulation of more or less respectful tourists, who in addition to spoiling the magic of the moment, tend to distort the space open to them.
This is what the famous hashtag #InstagramVsReality has been trying to denounce for several years now, with which many travelers want to reveal the “behind the scenes” of these photos that often make us dream.
A Great Wall of China, a Brooklyn Bridge or a Taj Mahal that looks like a shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon, Balinese beaches covered in rubbish left by holidaymakers, natural thermal baths in Iceland that look like a municipal swimming pool or even the Mona Lisa that looks like an insignificant poster drowned behind the flashes: some sites like Buzzfeed do not hesitate to compile these posts which show the tragic reality of these (too) coveted places, the experience of which is all the more disappointing because it is not accompanied by a calibrated script and photoshopped retouching.
Altered dream sites
By definition static, the Instagram photo can in fact hardly faithfully attest to the reality of a three-dimensional environment, subject not only to an out-of-control crowd but also to meteorological upheavals.
Many people found themselves faced with a thick fog when they tried to immortalizing Mount Fuji in Japanor facing greenish lagoons in Bacalar, Mexico, in the middle of the rainy season. And sometimes, the sites are simply degraded, alienated by this overexposure to tourism.
In a report, RTL cited the striking examples of wildflower fields on the hills of Walker Canyon in California, trampled by merciless Instagrammers, or pieces of Mistreated white corals on Corralejo’s “popcorn” beach to the point of killing nearly 120 kg since 2018, while France 5in a subject on overtourism, cited the “Panda Eye” of the Étretat cliff, invented from scratch, which attracts 1 million visitors each year, to the point of accelerating the erosion of its soil.
There is no shortage of examples, they are even getting longer, to the point that some public authorities are taking drastic measures to try to stem the phenomenon. In France, the island of Porquerolles and the Calanques of Marseille have set up daily quotas, while the beach of Crozon in Brittany works every day to de-list itself on the Internet.
Immortalize differently
The question then remains whether it is still reasonable – or even decent? – to go on a trip to see with your own eyes the Moais on Easter Island in the middle of the Pacific, the site of Petra in Jordan or the pyramids of Giza in Egypt?
“We can start by questioning the value of what we see on social media and being sensitive to the implications of its images,” says Paige, the journalist for Timewhich also reminds us how our clichés, however harmless they may be, tend to reproduce neo-colonial tropes of exoticization or fantasized assimilation.
If we’re so keen to immortalise our travels, she recommends, for example, avoiding selfies and egotistical staging that can sometimes be offensive to local culture, or embellishing our Instagram post with an informative perspective on the place we’re visiting. “And remember that we ultimately have a lot of power as ‘influencers’ over the people who follow us, even if they’re just our old high school friends and second cousins.”
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