There’s no fighting it. All our travel goals now come from Instagram. We’ve been sold some very specific fantasies in recent years. Now, all we want is to head to Indonesia, book the Real Bali Swing, and have someone take a picture from the back. We’ve pencilled in Imerovigli, a village in Santorini, Greece, to do the girl-against-the-cliffs photo, floaty dress, heels and all. We want a piece of that floating breakfast, served in a private pool in the Maldives (we’ve planned a 5-second video too). Oh, we have to, HAVE TO go to Iceland. That’s where we’ll take pics of the hot tub at Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon…

Insta fantasies tend to get a slap in the face when real tourists spend real money on real vacations. That swing takes half a day to get to, and it’s all over in three minutes. Santorini is expensive, and there’s a queue of young people who hiked there, changed into a floaty dress and heels, and have queued up to take the same shot before the light fades. Floating breakfasts taste like a scam. And even in remote Jökulsárlón, there’s always a fellow tourist in the frame.

We asked travel content creators and longtime-travel writers about what’s usually left out of the frame when picture-perfect shots make it to our feed. And of course, what it takes to have a memorable holiday, with and without a camera.

Framing it up

“People aren’t travelling to explore places anymore,” says Rashmi Chadha, founder of travel company Wovoyage. “They’re travelling to follow trends and the itineraries they saw on social media.” The numbers back it up. Booking.com’s 2024 survey of travel trends shows that 66% of Indians who took trips over the past year used social media as inspiration.

Muskaan Mittal and Aashish Gupta started their page, @TheWanderfullyLostDuo, in May 2023. The most popular queries from their 3.5 lakh followers: The best spots for taking couple pics in Bali, how to recreate their sunset picture in the Andamans, the most photo-worthy water villas in Malaysia. “The algorithm changes every three to six months. We’re constantly changing the way we film and edit our Reels and photos,” says Mittal.

Author and travel writer Tanushree Podder says the search for a defining moment is shaping the way we view travel today. “There are broadly two types of travellers: Older ones looking for memorable cultural and food experiences, and the younger generation, who are usually seeking thrilling moments to boast about on social media. You can’t escape the selfie-seeking tourist anymore.”

Anant Upadhya and Rashmee Joshi, who run @TravelWithSeaRats, say there’s much more going on behind the scenes on a content-creator’s trip than their followers imagine. Most shots are staged to make a hotel room, resort, food and location look better than it ever will in real life. But “people travel to different locations just to recreate a specific photo they saw online,” says Joshi. In Varanasi, the trending shot is one that features the person in a boat on the river, with gulls framing them overhead. But birds rarely cooperate, the river is rarely empty. Much of that idyll is created in Photoshop. “And because there’s such a hype for the ride, the boatman will charge ten times more,” says Joshi.

What’s off camera

Mere mortals can’t keep up with content creators. And if they want to enjoy their holiday, they probably shouldn’t. Mittal and Gupta have woken up as early as 3am to reach a popular spot early and avoid the hordes of tourists in the pics they’ll post. “Most people arrive at a tourist spot by 10am and leave by 3pm,” says Mittal. “We’ve learned to craft our content around the golden hours – sunrise and sunset.” Even the best plans can backfire. This May, they were in Kelingking Beach in Bali, popularly known as the T-Rex beach because of the shape of the cliff that surrounds it. “It was about 35 degrees and there were hundreds of people waiting to take that same shot. It wasn’t fun,” recalls Gupta.

Last year, Upadhya and Joshi posted images of themselves swimming with nurse sharks in Maldives. It took 20 or so retakes, holding their breath for long periods between each take. And with each take, there was the worry that the usually docile fish would suddenly attack. “It’s a split-second moment when things align – the sun, the sharks, and you.” It’s not the kind of shoot that most tourists have the time or patience for.

With images depicting glamorous big cities, the playbook is tweaked. Consider those cinematic slow-mo clips of New York City, in which the day deepens into dusk. “It’s unreal. No one who’s ever visiting the place will see those speedlines in real life,” says Kiran Mehta, a freelance writer who writes about travel. The fantasy travel photo is not limited to travel influencers, she says. Travel writers do it too. “Travel writers do it too. Playing up the positive attributes of a place is inherent to the field. But it tends to happen more on social media because clickbait - with its inbuilt exaggeration - is more amenable to the online medium. The staged photograph is also more likely to be seen on an influencer’s feed simply because photography is a much bigger part of their job than a writer’s.”

Pack it and hack it

When a tourism board is footing the bill for perfect visuals, even creators struggle to keep up. “We’re expected to get up and do scuba diving from 6am to 8am, then go for a trek from 11am to 1pm, then shoot kayaking content for three hours after that,” says Joshi. They’ve been to 20 countries, and have learnt to cut down their shooting time from four to five hours to about one hour. Last year, they took a “vacation from our vacation” and stayed home to recover. “Being physically fit is part of the job, but it does take a toll on our health sometimes.”

Influencers also make it look deceptively easy to get the perfect shot, which belies the time and effort they’ve put into their work, says Mehta. “Viewers get lured in by the surreal images. But in an attempt to re-create it, they lose out on the chance to tap into the pulse of the city.”

For the rest of us, Chadha says, it’s possible to plan the perfect trip, only to experience what she calls “travel shock”. It’s when visitors realise that those perfect moments cost more energy, planning and money than they accounted for. “They saw the static shot, but not how tough it is to make it to the top.” She recently removed a visit to the Mekong Delta from her company’s Vietnam tour. “I personally didn’t find it to be worth the hype,” she says. But customers kept demanding it be added to the itinerary. “Most of the time, they are disappointed when they see it in reality.”

Joshi admits though that for creators who make their money from content creation, it’s heavy work. “Sometimes, the stress of catering to the algorithm is so much that you’re no longer a traveller. But good storytelling, curated or not, eventually makes it to viewers.” She, like other creators, is learning to put the camera down. “If there’s an experience which requires us to be fully present, then we would rather not ruin the moment by taking pictures,” says Gupta.

Besides, visuals aren’t the only marker of a great holiday. Sunset shots, staged slow-mos, GIFs of floating breakfasts and #HottieInAHotSpring Reels can’t capture the memory of the actual moment. “It was at a perfume-making workshop in Bali, Indonesia, where I understood the importance of olfactory senses on travel memories. Even today the floral notes of ylang-ylang take me back to Indonesia. How do you capture a smell in a picture anyway? Tech can’t do that yet.”

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