Travel Bloggers Lost It
I’ve ended up surrounding myself with agency people over the years. PR, design, press, social media types—the whole ecosystem. It wasn’t planned, it just happened somehow, and I’m not complaining. There are definitely worse fates. But the benefit is that you get a direct line to what’s actually going on in those worlds, and what I’m hearing lately is making me genuinely angry.
I’ve spent years telling people to build something online. A blog, Twitter, YouTube, whatever works for you. A lot of you listened. You developed a voice, scattered yourselves across the internet. Fashion bloggers figured out their formula quickly. Little blogs about cars, tech, music started gaining real traction. But travel bloggers—that’s the group that’s slowly losing its mind.
For years I had no complaints about what you were doing. You made friends with PR agencies and tourism boards, formed collectives, you wrote and shot photos and made videos. It was all legitimate work, and I was genuinely happy for each of you getting to visit the most beautiful places on Earth while earning something on the side.
Then I started hearing stories from people inside the industry. PR people, tourism board employees. And these stories are hard to believe. Some of you have started making increasingly insane demands just to get on a plane. Suddenly you need five-star hotels, business class flights, appearance fees, room service, per diems, admission costs, shuttles, expense coverage. It’s gotten obscene.
The stories keep coming and I don’t know what to do with them. One travel blogger ordered five appetizers at a Michelin restaurant just to taste each one. The bill went to the tourism board. Another one sent a list of demands so absurd that even Vogue journalists wouldn’t ask for it—sent it to everyone in her group, copied a government tourism official, a day before the flight, without even letting the PR agency know. Then there’s the blogger who was invited to a South Pacific island for a week, ignored the entire itinerary that was built specifically for him, and basically disappeared except for the flight home. I keep hearing these stories and I can’t even process how entitled some of you have become.
What kills me is the disconnect. Most of you have maybe a handful of followers, blog traffic that barely registers, a site that’s barely a few years old. And then you call a PR person and actually ask, Do you not know who I am?
Like that’s supposed to mean something. You have twelve Facebook fans. The gap between how important you think you are and how invisible you actually are is hard to even process.
What really bothers me is the fallout. The PR people have to constantly justify to their clients why they sent you anywhere when you’re acting like a nightmare. The tourism boards that finally took a chance on bloggers, that actually spent money on this, now they’re gun-shy. Nobody wants to repeat that experience. You’re blacklisting yourselves—I know enough of you who are already on the do-not-contact list in major countries. And you’re poisoning the well for everyone else. These companies are still figuring out how to work with bloggers. When they see what it costs and what they get back—a handful of likes, maybe a share—they go back to what they know. TV. Magazines. Print. And suddenly the opportunities that might have gone to better, smarter, more respectful bloggers just disappear.
Here’s what needs to happen: stop acting like this. You’re not Tavi Gevinson or Susanna Lau or Yvan Rodic. And even those people handle it with more grace than you. Figure out what’s actually being offered and what’s expected of you before you say yes. Talk to the right people. Business class flights and five-star hotels are nice, but they’re not a requirement. Some tourism boards can’t afford that. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, just say no and let someone else have the opportunity. Don’t say yes to everything and then renegotiate at the last second. Either you can deliver on the agreement or you can’t. If you can’t, step aside.
You need to understand something: nobody outside the internet knows who we are. Nobody. We’re minor figures in a small universe, barely even that. If you’re letting this go to your head, you’re living in a fantasy. And you should be grateful that nobody’s actually figured out how completely disconnected from reality you’ve become. Blogs matter. But only if you don’t keep shooting yourself in the foot because of some short-term payoff that you’ll regret anyway.
So I’m sitting in a bar in Kreuzberg with my agency friends, drinking wine, and we talk about pretty students and vodka and the homeless guy outside my apartment, and we let all of this fade for a while. We forget about the travel bloggers acting insane. And I realize maybe it’s not such a curse after all to be surrounded by people who actually understand how the industry works. You get to see clearly how things really function, and how easily some people can destroy it all for themselves and everyone else.