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While visiting the United Kingdom this summer, my family and I stopped for lunch at Bourton-on-the-Water, a village in England’s famous Cotswolds district. Climbing rosebushes cover quaint cottages built from the area’s signature honey-colored stone and flourish in lush gardens. The River Windrush flows through Bourton’s cobbled streets, giving the village its name. Green-headed mallard ducks and snowy swans float peacefully on the river, which is spanned by many small stone bridges. The picturesque scene has given Bourton its reputation as the “Venice of the Cotswolds.”
Unfortunately, that title isn’t the only one Bourton holds. Thanks to its charming fairy-tale vibe, it’s also known as a premier travel destination for social media tourists. When we visited in early June, the tiny village was filled with crowds of visitors. Many of them seemed intent on finding the perfect spot for a photo, even at the price of rude behavior toward fellow tourists. One group blocked a stone bridge for minutes on end as the visitors posed for photos, oblivious to sidelong glances from other travelers. An English travel writer who visited Bourton in 2025 was so disgusted by the over-tourism that he wrote an article explaining why he plans never to return.
Photo by John Keeble/Getty Images
As social media has grown, it’s become a much more influential factor in travel. According to travel blog Hotelagio, nearly 48% of travelers choose vacation spots with the intent of showcasing them on their socials. Travelers under age 40 are extremely likely to plan trips based on influencer content, and as many as 90% of Gen Z travelers use social media for travel planning. Countless travel blogs offer lists of “the most Instagrammable locations in the world,” and travel influencers like @thebucketlistfamily garner millions of followers.
The introduction of social media into the travel landscape often leads to over-tourism. Iceland is a popular social media travel destination, with over one million posts tagged with the hashtag #icelandtrip. In 2010, the year Instagram launched, Iceland received fewer than 500,000 annual visitors, according to Statistics Iceland. Since 2023, tourism to the island has experienced explosive growth and now sits at well over 2 million visitors a year.
All of which raises the question: Is social media ruining our travel experiences?
Anyone who’s ever traveled internationally knows that it’s rarely as picture-perfect as Instagram would have you believe. Travel delays, lost luggage, jet lag, bad food, lack of air conditioning — the list of potential pitfalls goes on. In other words, travel is simply a microcosm of real life in the real world: often beautiful, sometimes messy, always full of surprises.
Aside from the inconvenience caused by the overcrowding of popular destinations, social media tourism makes us worse travelers by raising expectations to unrealistic heights. It blinds us to the true experience of travel by creating a kind of tunnel vision that focuses only on getting the perfect photo. It takes the inherent human desire for beauty and commodifies it, encouraging people to treat beautiful places merely as a way to gain likes or followers. It makes travel more about curating an online image than about experiencing new places or learning about other cultures.
When reflecting on his boyhood experiences with travel, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see.” Chesterton is saying that the true traveler comes to his trip with an open mind, prepared for new and unexpected experiences. The “tripper” approaches travel with a checklist and has no attention for anything he has not determined to see in advance. He lacks the flexibility that is necessary for travel to become a truly transformative experience.
One could quite easily substitute the words “social media tourist” to create a 21st-century equivalent. Granted, there’s nothing wrong with having a travel itinerary or with posting about trips on social media. But there is something deeply wrong with treating a trip as just one more way to gain likes.
In a world where social media is ubiquitous, we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of seeing the world only through a camera lens. Technology is great, but it can never replace real-life experiences, and it increasingly threatens our ability to enjoy those experiences.
Thankfully, my family and I were able to keep social media from ruining our trip. While we did go sightseeing in some more mainstream travel destinations (after all, what’s a trip to the U.K. without a sight of Big Ben?), we also managed to find some less “touristy” sites. York Minster Cathedral was not only more sublimely beautiful than the famous Westminster Abbey, but much less crowded. The small Lake District village we spent a night in was nearly as picturesque as Bourton-on-the-Water and offered the rural serenity missing from Bourton. And while I took plenty of photos throughout the trip, I focused more on capturing memories for the years to come than on finding the perfect shot for my Instagram post.
The good news? Even in a world increasingly influenced by social media, it’s still possible to keep it from ruining your vacations.
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Grace Plath is a 2026 Chesterton media fellow at New Guard Press. She studies journalism at Patrick Henry College. Follow her on X at @gracejplath.
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