Instagram Ruined Travel. Now What?
In the quest for the perfect vacation, we’ve forgotten how to wander. The good news is that designers can help users figure out when to pick up their devices and when to set them aside and get lost in the moment.
It was Courtney Scott’s last night of a trip to Italy with her husband, and they were in Florence. In the United States, where we take short vacations, there is pressure to make each day, even each meal, count, and Scott, the Group Vice President of Strategy at Huge, wanted to find the perfect meal to cap off their trip. So she took to the internet, scouring social media, agonizing over finding the right place. “I was double- and triple-checking that this was going to be the restaurant we would remember forever,” she says. “But ultimately, it was the worst meal on our trip. We walked thirty minutes to the edge of town, past so many spots filled with locals. I had designed the perfect evening enabled by technology and was ultimately led me astray. I just thought, Have I lost the ability to trust my instincts and wander?”
Travel is supposed to be a diversion from your typical routine, whether it’s a way to escape the realities of your over-scheduled life or to explore new frontiers. Technology has changed the way we travel: how we plan, how we share, even how we get around. It’s helped us refine what we do and see — relying on whatever is in that year’s Lonely Planet is a thing of the past — and allowed us to pack in more experiences and make them more personalized. But it has changed travel’s ability to serve as something that liberates us from our day to day.
So what remains is a lot of questions: What role should digital strategists and designers have in reforming our travel habits? When is it appropriate to encourage users to set down their phones? How do we help relieve the pressure of having the perfect vacation, as well as the post-vacay blues, as users transition back to reality?
Planning that getaway
Embrace technology. It has allowed our travels to be a little less organized and more spontaneous, given that we can book ferries, change hotels, and make restaurant reservations on our phones. But it’s also worth wondering what else could be booked or recommended through our phones. Could we fall for a Tuscan bed and breakfast and easily shift all our travel plans, so we can stay an extra two days?
And social media is maybe the best source of travel inspiration ever known. But when we’re all agog over photos on social media of the flamingos of Aruba or people leaping in front of the Prada Marfa, it sometimes feels impossible to choose between options. Case in point, there are currently 107 million #vacation posts. Are there ways to easily aggregate and harness our most trusted recommendations?
This is where it can pay to seek out experts. Travel companies like Prior or Sailing Collective use their social media platforms to share shots of locations like the Croatian islands to great effect but featuring real people with a lot of experience — and strong opinions — to help you sort through what seems like endless options. Sarah-Leigh Shenton, the director of marketing at Red Savannah, a UK-based luxury travel company, says her firm observes social media trends, so if they notice Capidoccia has become popular, it’ll make sure it has villas to rent and solid recommendations for their clients. She also notes that in a part of Italy popular for hiking, local authorities were able to track tourists using geo tags in real time to open up new paths or redirect people to less busy routes. Plus, they’ll keep a (discreet) eye on you once you’re on the road. “We try to use social media to inspire our clients, but we use it to follow them, too,” Shenton says. “If we see a post that feels slightly negative, we can check on them and see if they’re OK.”
Detox, selectively. The ease of having a smartphone comes with the temptation to check email or Slack or text messages, meaning we’re never truly unavailable (although we’ve made sure to turn on an autoresponder). Our eyes are glued to our screens morning to night, and people feel uncomfortable simply passing a moment together in silence, even if they’re hanging out at sunset on the Amalfi Coast. There’s a chance Instagram is going to try to help us curb our own addiction to it by hiding likes, something it has experimented with in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Japan. But to go further, maybe there’s a vacation mode on apps, or a limiting of screen time. Or someone could take a cue from Arianna Huffington, who tucks her phone to bed each night and sells a $65 phone bed charging station for others trying to do the same.
Or we could force ourselves into a detox with remote locations. Red Savannah’s clients seek it out to help them find remote locations to truly get off the grid, including a mobile tented camp in Greenland only available six weeks a year or to the Maramures region in Romania, to farming communities that seem like going back in time hundreds of years.
Pick up your phone when it counts. There are moments when you should pick up your phone, and designers can identify those moments. Perhaps they can take cues from Broadway shows like “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” or “Sea Wall/A Life,” which have designated and decorated selfie stations where attendees can get a good shot — and then put their phones away inside the theaters. Or travel companies like El Camino, which leads tours of Millennial generation hot spots like Nicaragua or Colombia complete with a professional photographer to get all the shots you need without having to pull out your phone and do it yourself.
Maybe the better question is one posed by Bryan Le, group design director at Huge, What is the high-tech version of plaque at a monument or a national park? “If there were an educational component, and if people understood more about what they were experiencing in the moment, they might be more apt to enjoy it more,” he says “You read it and put your phone away after getting into the history and context.”
Sharing is caring. Social media is an emotional pressure cooker for vacations, and the quest to show off a perfect trip is its own source of anxiety. “Before social media, your vacation was personal, and now it’s another thing by which we can be judged,” Scott says. There’s now a performative aspect to our vacations — we use our digital storytelling as a way of competing with our friends’ trips.
People aren’t just waiting until the end of the trip or the end of the day to post, but doing it live, experiencing daybreak on a beach in Maderas for the first time through the view of a camera. Earlier this year, the travel writer Laura Studarus posted that “what Instagram has really turned me into is an unexpected metrics machine. I’ve turned the app into my own version of Farmville, creating a system I can game to get more attention with posting times, hashtag combinations, interactions, and giving into expectations by creating content I know will gather likes…Obsessing over Instagram as a platform rather than a the nice visual content within is not unlike wandering into a gallery and bypassing the art in favor of admiring the blank walls.”
It’s high time to bring back the old-fashioned post-vacation slideshow party. It’s kitschy, but maybe that’s not a bad thing, and being surrounded by friends is a solid way to break out of the post-vacation blues. And if no one has seen any of your pictures or heard any anecdotes, nibbling on chocolate-covered macadamia nuts and drinking Mai Tais while you see a well-edited Hawaiian photo set sounds like a quality hang.
Be easy on yourself. These technologies are new. We’re the first generation of people learning how to live with them. We’ve forgotten how to stumble into what are often the most exciting travel experiences. In other words, we’ve lost the ability to wander, both literally and figuratively. The answer to how we learn to wander again is not to ditch our phones, but to learn how to use them more intelligently and more sparingly. As Scott says, “Don’t be afraid to get lost even if you have a map in your pocket.”
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
