It’s easy to dismiss travel creators as photogenic influencers who trot around the world and get paid to look hot in exotic locations. After all, that’s the content that’s favoured by algorithms. But behind the wall of girlies in bikinis, the travel creator economy goes deeper, from old-school bloggers to YouTubers from all generations.
Love them or hate them, it’s impossible to deny their influence. A massive 44% of Australians across age demos have booked a ticket to a destination because they saw it on social media — a number that jumps up to two-thirds for Gen Z.
Social media has given aspiring travel creators an accessible platform to kick-start their careers; they no longer have to rely on lengthy blog posts, professional photography skills or SEO tactics. All you need to be a creator is a phone, an internet connection, and a good eye for what works.
But for the most part, travel creators aren’t looked too highly upon by the general public. One thread in the Reddit r/travel community describes them as “lame-o’s that think they’re more important than they actually are”, a “plague”, and “don’t have the creativity to do anything outside of what TikTok feeds them”.
While this could certainly be true of some influencers, it’s unfair to paint the entire travel creator community with the same broad brush.
Take Benjamin Rich — a middle-aged dude who goes by Bald and Bankrupt on YouTube, exploring untapped regions in videos for his 4 million followers. He’s the last person your mind would conjure up when you hear ‘travel influencer’, but most of the travel creator economy is built around people like Ben.
Finding the negative aspects of travel influencers and creators is easy — I’ve written a whole article about it. But surely it has given us some positives, too?
We’re Getting Realistic Representations of Travel
When the travel creator industry was built on bloggers and Instagrammers, all we really saw were picture-perfect representations of destinations. Influencers in flowy dresses or high-end hiking gear posed in pristine locations, crowds edited out, a subtle filter perfectly applied.
Nowadays, short-form video and our unrestricted access to the internet means that more raw, unfiltered content is the norm on social media.
There’s a reason that young travellers are skipping past ‘traditional’ media and going to TikTok when planning a trip, for a more realistic and honest look at a location. We no longer have to rely on bloggers getting kickbacks from affiliate links or destination guides clearly written by a city’s tourism board.
We’re Getting to See Places We’d Never Experience
For most of the world’s population — even in so-called ‘wealthy’ countries — travel is a luxury, a privilege that not everyone experiences.
The good travel creators aren’t just making videos stuffed with recommendations for trip planning, they’re shining a spotlight on places in an entertaining way. Being able to click into YouTube or TikTok and see different places around the world, without having to fork out thousands for a holiday, is a pretty amazing thing.
This is the main drawcard for a lot of Bald and Bankrupt’s audience. “[His] travel vlogs to run down villages in the middle of Russia are somehow magical, not places I’d even thought of visiting yet Bald makes them as interesting as the Eiffel Tower,” one fan wrote on Reddit.
We’re Finding New Places to Explore
Nine in ten people say they’ve been turned on to a travel destination by social media posts. Sure, most of these might be tourism hotspots we’ve all heard of before, but there’s no denying that creators have had a hand in shining a light on previously ‘under-the-radar’ destinations.
The creator industry and social media can be credited with the rising popularity of trips to places like Albania, Japan, and Santorini, all of which have seen a huge uptick in annual visitors since the pandemic.
Travelling to these lesser-known spots doesn’t just give tourists bragging rights for visiting places before they were cool. It also helps alleviate overtourism in other places; just look at the destination dupes trend on TikTok.
Creators are encouraging people to visit Paros instead of Santorini, Palermo instead of Lisbon, Taipei as a replacement for Seoul — you get the idea. And the fewer people visiting cities already straining with the weight of post-pandemic tourists, the better.
It’s also great for the locals in these destinations: last year tourism brought 37% more money into the country than in 2019, significantly boosting the economy and job market.
Research Is Way Easier
Not to expose my age, but I remember trips in my early 20s where I would have to borrow a Lonely Planet guidebook from the library to research a trip before leaving.
Then the mid-2010s were spent scrolling through impossibly long blog posts, crammed with SEO keywords and oversaturated photos to find a good cafe in your chosen holiday spot.
Now, it’s as easy as chucking a few words in the TikTok search bar, or scrolling through an IG location tag, and you’re served a smorgasbord of recommendations you can pick through.
Look, I’m not out here saying that social media and creators are the best thing to happen to the travel industry since those brothers invented airplanes.
But instead of being so quick to point out how travel influencers are the scourge of the earth, maybe let’s also take a second to think about the good things, too.
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