Digital Nomads
Leisure travel is increasing around the world; according to a study by Visa there will be a 35 percent increase over the next 10 years. Three emerging trends are driving this rapid growth—travel is cheaper, the middle class is growing, and the internet is making it easier for travellers. International travel is becoming more affordable, thanks to new technology and fiercer competition in the industry. Digital connectivity is increasing awareness of and access to alternative modes of transportation, accommodation, and destinations, thereby enabling personalised travel options. Lastly, there is a significant rise of the middle class, which is enabling more people to travel. This trend is creating what Visa dubs, a new ‘travelling class’: a group of consumers for whom travel is no longer a luxury but a part of life (Lonely Planet, 2016). In 1996, there were 26,825,9000 US-outbound trips abroad. In 2016, there were 772,559,988, according to the National Travel & Tourism office. This is a 170 percent increase over 20 years (Champion Traveler, 2017). China is expected to lead the way in this growth with a high estimate of 85 percent increase in travel spending by 2025. Chinese travellers are projected to nearly double their spending to $255 billion USD during this period, representing nearly one-sixth of the global travel spend.
Tourists from European nations doing outbound travels are on the rise as well due to their better standard of living. According to WorldAtlas, Finland tops the chart with 7.50 total trips undertaken per person per year followed by the United States at 6.70, and coming third is Sweden with 6.00 total trips. The Finnish people make most of the inbound and outbound travels because of their high income and lower unemployment status. Their cultural attributes also make them widely acceptable, as they are open and, more importantly, have a travel-oriented culture. Even though Americans come in second, they tend to travel more inside of their own country. This can easily be seen just by the percentage of Americans owning a passport, which is only 36 percent, which is low compared to other countries: 60 percent of passport-holding Canadians and 75 percent for Brits and Aussies (Snow, 2016). The top countries that travel most are Scandinavian (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway). The reason for this is that most Scandinavians are wealthy by global norms and have higher standards of living, so they often travel to foreign countries to escape the cold of the winter season. They have lower unemployment rates and, as the cost of living is high, they make trips abroad to get better value for their money; they even own family homes in other countries. Comparing these Scandinavian countries, Americans have fewer holidays and take more domestic trips to visit friends and family. With this said, many travellers from diverse cultures and a low to high travel-oriented culture have one common characteristic—they are experiencing an increase in travel, they are digital nomads.
Insta-tourism
Instagram has become an explosive treasure for travel inspiration. More than 40 percent of millennials prioritise ‘Instagrammability’ when choosing their next holiday spot. The reason being, as Instagram has shown us celebrities’ personal lives—behind the scenes of popular events, new products explained and shared by your favourite influencer—it has become a more genuine and trustworthy platform, rather than a brochure or a travel website (Spaid, 2019). Millennials are known to have a higher level of trust for peers as well as for brands who share a more humanly persona. According to Lake Wanaka Tourism, influencers provide an ‘incredible’ return on investment. ‘I guess following photographers on Instagram gives a more genuine expression than looking for inspiration in a tourism brochure’, says Johan Lolos, who launched his career as a paid brand and tourism photographer after trading Instagram posts for accommodation and experiences in Lake Wanaka. ‘I use influencers to speak to the consumers directly’, says Jo Thomas, owner/director of Click Travel Marketing & PR. ‘Every destination client I represent has a social media strategy. It is vital because Instagram posts are becoming an important part of travellers’ research process.’ By just scrolling down to it, we can find pictures of the most idyllic spots from around the world, and travel behaviours are changing as a result. ‘Insta-tourism’ is having a great impact; 70 percent of travel enthusiasts use the platform to share their travel plans, while 67 percent use Instagram to find inspiration for their journeys, according to research conducted by Facebook (Brooks, 2018).
Research done by easyJet found that 55 percent of those surveyed had booked trips purely based on images they had seen on the social network, and 32 percent of the 2,000 people surveyed also admitted that their biggest motivation when picking a location was how nice the photos will look on their own Instagram feed. The study found that destinations that provided scenic or visually striking backdrops were growing in popularity. In 2019, among the most travelled-to were the Northern Lights in Iceland, Italy’s Lake Como, the picturesque Greek island of Santorini, and the Benagil sea cave in Portugal (Wright, 2019). For instance, in 2014 I studied abroad in Barcelona, and ‘the Bunkers’, which offer a scenic view of the city, were popular, but upon visiting there was a small crowd that would gather there to hang-out for some drinks. Recently I went back to see a mob of people literally fighting for the perfect spot for the perfect picture—people were getting in a queue to get a picture in the best spot. This has led the neighbourhood to start protesting due to the current tourist ‘invasion’.
Social shareability is a valuable currency, and the smartest hotels and resorts have realised this. Instagram has gone from something fun we do when we travel to becoming the whole reason to travel, and the tourism industry has picked up on the trend. Sebastian Renzacci, CEO and founder of Trip Guru, has recently introduced ‘Instagram tours’ as part of the company’s Bali adventure offering. ‘One of our travel curators, a UK millennial blogger, was the first to test it, and provide additional spots which are off the beaten path and visually stunning.’ Their main customers are Australian, American, and European born between 1981 and 1996, 70 percent of whom are female. For Airbnb, the new thing was to start selling not only accommodation, but the rest of the trip. Airbnb’s most significant element of the expansion was to be the City Host venture, renamed ‘Experiences’ and intended as off-the-tourism-grid activities travellers would not otherwise be able to do that would be offered by locals, curated and vetted by Airbnb, and designed to play up the unique expertise and character of the people offering them. In Italy, you can go truffle hunting with a third-generation truffle hunter, in Indonesia you can go island hopping for 3 days with a local, or take a 7-day trek to Petra, Jordan and so on. However, these ‘Experiences’ have been completely dominated by Insta-tourism, just by scrolling down to look for a tour, you find that about 1 out of 5 of the offerings are ‘photoshoots for Instagram’. The rise of the professional photoshoot on vacation is a logical extension of the influencer economy and travel companies. Destinations are increasingly being promoted using the neologistic verb ‘instagrammable’—with marketing campaigns frequently touting the most instagrammable cafes, restaurants, road trips, forests, and so on.
Insta-tourism Disruption on Destinations
While travel companies, agencies, hotels, cruise ships, tourist locations, airports, and airlines have started to reshape their business with visual posts in mind, becoming an insta-famous is both great for business, but a nightmare for locals. There are three destinations I have been this past year that have greatly influenced this research, Dubrovnik in Croatia, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, and Athens, Greece. Upon visiting the Croatian town of Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was obvious to see the overwhelming amounts of visitors arriving to Dubrovnik’s Old Town. According to data from the eVisitor system, for the whole month of March 2019 a total of 55,894 tourists visited Dubrovnik, 42 percent more than March 2019 (Vasovic, 2019). The HBO TV show Game of Thrones has been responsible for around half of the 10 percent annual growth in tourists the city has seen in recent years (my tour guide stated that there has been a 20 percent increase each year since the show started in 2011) (Rigby, 2017).
In 2017, the city of Dubrovnik introduced its ‘Respect the City’ plan, which aimed to limit the number of tourists from cruises visiting to 4,000 at any given moment. In the summer of 2018, I visited Salar de Uyuni, located in Bolivia, and it seemed strange yet smart that all local agencies marketed themselves by the quality of the pictures they had taken for their guests. It is necessary by all means to hire one of these agencies, since the Salar is large and you can easily get lost in it (10,582 square kilometres). The agencies do not focus on telling you the facts of this natural wonder but instead have props, tripods, and flashlights to give you the best pictures there. There are many destinations like this that purely revolve their ‘selling point’ on the quality of pictures instead of the quality of the experience and knowledge gained from the site.
Lastly, Athens was another clear victim of the overcrowding and picture-worthy sites. The Acropolis of Athens is one of the most valued UNESCO heritage sites, and even though its monuments are ‘universal symbols of the classical spirit and civilisation and form the greatest architectural and artistic complex’, it is not as magical as it sounds when paying it a visit. There is a frightening number of tourists visiting daily with two-hour long queues just to get tickets before even getting inside. You can see the mobs of people circling the Parthenon, and they have two main characteristics—those to learn and those for the picture. Upon observing the crowds, it was clearly easy to see who was there for the historical curiosity of the site by those hiring professional guides that would carefully and passionately explain the historical facts and their personal interests of the place. Sadly, you would see another large group of the crowd who would be posing for pictures disrespectfully by climbing the stones when they were told not to and shoving through the people around them pointing their selfie sticks to get the perfect shot. Instead of being able to be in complete awe of the site, it was a great shock to witness such multitude of tourists.
This year, a young Indian couple fell to their deaths after taking selfies on a cliff edge at Yosemite National Park and another couple died after falling 30 metres off a beach wall while taking selfies in Portugal. A recent study into death by selfies found that 259 people died in a six-year period while attempting to capture the perfect selfie. Due to climbers fighting, not only for their lives, but for the selfie at the highest peak in the world, Everest has had 11 deaths this year. Some of the deaths this year were caused by people getting held up in long lines on the last 1,000 feet of the climb. The last time 11 or more people died on Everest was in 2015, during an avalanche. Where does this leave us? Travel photos have been around for decades and they are not going to stop.
References
Brooks, A. (2018). 7 Unexpected Ways Instagram Has Changed the World. [online] Social Media Today. Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/7-unexpected-ways-instagram-has-changed-the-world/539032/ [Accessed 26 Aug. 2019].
Champion Traveler. (2017). Why has US Outbound Travel and Tourism Increased 170% over the Past 20 Years?[online] Champion Traveler. Available at: https://championtraveler.com/news/why-has-us-outbound-travel-and-tourism-increased-170-over-the-past-20-years/ [Accessed August 27, 2019].
Snow, B. (2016). Off the Grid: Why Americans Don’t Travel Abroad. [online] Pastemagazine.com. Available at: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/04/off-the-grid-why-americans-travel-domestic-instead-1.html [Accessed August 27, 2019].
Spaid, K. (2019). Instagrammable Tourism: Is Instagram Ruining the Travel Industry? [online] Neworld Associates. Available at: https://www.neworld.com/newsblog/2019/instagrammable-tourism/ [Accessed 26 Aug. 2019].
Vasovic, A. (2018). Croatia's Adriatic Gem Limits Number of Tourists to Fight Overcrowding. [online] Reuters. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-croatia-dubrovnik/croatias-adriatic-gem-limits-number-of-tourists-to-fight-overcrowding-idUSKBN1KP0BF [Accessed August 27, 2019].
Wright, M. (2019). Instagram Replacing Travel Brochures as Survey Finds Social Media Influencing Half of Holidaymakers' Choices. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/instagram-replacing-travel-brochures-survey-finds-social-media/ [Accessed 26 Aug. 2019].
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