The Instagram Traveller: The One Kind I Will Judge

My last article was about not judging other travellers. Live and let live, I said. We all travel differently, I said. Every journey is valid, I said and I meant it.

I take it back. Partially.

Because there is a category of traveller I have decided I am allowed to judge. Not the loud ones, not the slow ones, not even the ones who stop in the middle of a narrow medieval street to check Google Maps (because I am definitely one of those). No. I’m talking about the Instagram traveller. Specifically, the kind who arrives at one of the most significant places on earth, sets down three suitcases’ worth of outfits, and proceeds to not see it at all.

Let me describe the scene. You’ve waited for this. Maybe you’ve wanted to stand in front of the Colosseum, or the Louvre, or the multi hued tulip fields of Holland, since you were a teenager reading travel magazines. You arrive. You take a breath. You look up.

And then you see them.

She is on her fourth outfit change. He, the long-suffering husband/botfriend/partner, the designated cinematographer, the man who has not actually looked at anything since the flight landed, is crouched at a 45-degree angle, phone extended, reframing the shot for the five hundredth time because the light isn’t quite right, or her hair moved, or the previous 499 photos were somehow not the perfect enough. She is not looking at the monument. She is looking at the phone. She is checking if she liked what she saw of herself against the backdrop of a thing she has not yet seen.

There is a particular sub- species of this, the reel dancer. You will recognise them by the perfectly choreographed routine and entirely soundless, because the music, of course, is added later. They spin and step and point-to-the-sky in front of ancient ruins, or temple gates, or along the edge of a cliff where the view behind them is, objectively, a masterpiece. They do not turn around to look at it. The view is a prop. So is the location. So, increasingly, is the travel itself.

This is what bothers me, if I’m honest — not the photos, not even the effort. I take photos. We all take photos. I have been known to ask Paul to retake a shot because I blinked. I am not innocent.

What bothers me is the replacement. The substitution of experience with content. The monument, the landscape, the street that has stood for two thousand years, seen history live out and come 2026, it has been reduced to a backdrop. The woman posing in front of it will post the photo with a caption that says “Living for these views 🌿✨” and the views, in the literal sense, are something she did not take. She was busy being looked at to do any looking herself.

And the men, let’s talk about the men for a moment. The husbands and boyfriends trailing behind with camera equipment, rucksack on, joy visibly seeping out, and clearly the patience of a mountain for you couldn’t pay me to take 500 photos of the same subject in different clothes. They have the thousand-yard stare of someone who signed up for a holiday and ended up as a film crew. They will spend six hours in Rome without once sitting down at a cafe, because the light changes and the next location is forty minutes away and there are three more outfits in the bag. They have seen Rome entirely through a phone screen, in portrait mode, trying to get her centred.

Is this travel? Is this what a place is for?

I think what genuinely unnerves me is the sheer volume of them and what it has done to the places themselves. Certain streets, certain viewpoints, certain staircases that were once simply beautiful are now perpetually, hopelessly clogged. You approach and immediately understand that you will not be walking through so much as negotiating your way through. You sidestep one setup, only to nearly walk into another. You gingerly edge around a tripod, murmur an apology to someone who doesn’t look up from their screen, and find yourself performing a kind of apologetic shuffle as a half tourist, half intruder in a space that is, technically, also yours. Popular squares that should be breathtaking are now essentially outdoor studios, with queues forming not to see the thing but to photograph oneself in front of it. The monument becomes a film set. The rest of us are extras, trying not to ruin the shot.

Travel has always had its performance element. People have always dressed up, posed, brought home proof. The Victorian tourist bought a postcard. We take a photo. Fine. But somewhere in the shift from photograph-as-memory to content-as-product, something got lost. The willingness to simply receive a place. To let it be more interesting than you are.

I keep thinking about what it means to really see something. To stand in front of a Roman wall and feel the accumulated weight of two thousand years without immediately calculating your angle. To walk through a tulip field and smell it, not just frame it. To be, briefly, a small person in the presence of something large.

You can’t do that on your fourth outfit change.

You just can’t.