Influencers using social media to promote places and products is nothing new. But now there’s a new kid in town, deliberately discouraging a certain kind of travel, and calling out clichéd images and misleading travel ideals. Laura Hall looks at the rise of the de-influencers.
Have you seen the hashtag #deinfluencing that’s been making waves across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit? It’s hardly surprising as many people have long been questioning not only if we really need all the products and experiences being pushed our way but, and most importantly, whether they are being honestly reviewed.
As one user says on r/deinfluencing subreddit, a forum on the social network site, Reddit, “Many of us are sick and tired of being treated as endless buying machines instead of people. There are products you need, and helpful product reviews—and then there are products you don’t need, being pushed onto you by social media personalities. We don’t need the latest, trendiest things to be happy.”
So what exactly is de-influencing?
You’ll see it take on different shapes, and you’ve probably seen some of them already, across fashion, lifestyle, beauty, and now in travel. It could be an influencer or brand calling out marketing images in a ‘social media versus reality’ post—perhaps contrasting a perfectly empty beach, closed for a photo shoot, with the same one on a typical busy day with barely enough room to lay down your beach towel.
It could also be someone calling out a hackneyed trope, from women moving through a sight in a ‘flying’ dress, to the much-done ‘hot-air balloons over Cappadocia, Turkey’ post, and instead, demanding more authentic and original content. Perhaps an influencer has gone behind the scenes to show the admin, travel sickness and stress of travel, alongside those poolside cocktails. Or it could be calling out travel products as an unnecessary spend, especially when sustainability, recycling, and the circular economy are paramount, and budgets are tighter for many people with discretionary purchases on the slide.
In some ways, yes. Take influencer-turned-de-influencer Sabina Trojanova. She’s been posting about travel since 2014 as @girlvsglobe, initially, as she says, following a classic influencer format that would lead to maximum exposure. But a couple of years in, something switched for her.
“As my following grew, so did my frustration,” she says. “Between the years of 2016-2018, the best way to grow on Instagram was producing a very specific and stylized type of content. Think a young, predominantly white, woman wearing a beautiful dress, her back turned to the camera, looking out at a photogenic sight. Instead of focusing on destinations and their unique qualities, travel influencing was slowly turning into little more than aesthetically pleasing photoshoots.”
In 2023, it was reported that 70 percent of travel brands use influencer marketing—what that means is these brands are spending money to pay influencers to create (mostly idealized) travel content that serves their needs: Sales.
Trojanova quit social media in 2018, returning with a bigger focus on video in 2020, coinciding with a change in Instagram’s algorithm that prioritized video, meaning that you’re more likely to be clicked, liked and followed if you post moving images rather than stills.
She says this switch away from pure image-based stories allowed her to show a more realistic view of travel, and has lead her into de-influencing.
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“I believe many travel influencers—millennials in particular—are still spellbound by the 2010s aspirational aesthetic,” Trojanova says. “Their primary focus is creating beautiful content. I don’t begrudge anyone this goal and it’s certainly not my desire to judge other influencers’ creative output.
“But capturing beautiful content and capturing authentic content are two fundamentally different things,” continues Trojanova. Some people will always seek out escapist content, but many of us are sick of filtered, staged and idealized social media posts. I feel heartened by the fact that more realistic content is steadily increasing in popularity.”
Social media rewards a certain type of trend–the 2010s aspirational aesthetic, for example–algorithmically, so copying the style of successful posts rewards you with views and followers up to a point. But there comes a point when every post starts to look the same, and you want to see something new. Authentic content is the perfect counterpoint to too many perfect, staged and photoshopped pictures.
The move towards imperfection in social media is what fueled the rise of the BeReal app a couple of years ago, which asks followers to post ‘real’ images of what they’re doing right now, without giving too much time and attention to curation. It’s also behind the current vogue for low fi content, including the kind of grainy, overexposed vintage digital camera images that nods to the 1990s and strip back the artifice of the 2010s.
You can also see it in the rise in more informal storytelling in Stories or ‘photo dumps’, where the focus is on keeping it real over curating the most perfect photo grid. There’s also a sense that the anti-consumption trend feeds into a growing feeling that social media and digital culture has stepped too far away from how we’re really feeling: Staged photos are not reality, and we’re starting to wise up on what seeing too much perfection on our tiny screens does to us.
It depends and naturally, there can be a price to pay for de-influencing: When your followers have been used to aspirational glamor shots of destinations, peeling back the curtain to show what it’s really like may have consequences.
As an example, Trojanova lost followers as she started on the de-influencer path. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As de-influencing has taken off across social media, it’s also become a way to show that the de-influencers are tune with their audience, instead of mindlessly hawking anything that comes their way—or that comes with a financial incentive to promote it.
Zero Waste Store, also on TikTok, is doing something similar, championing using items you have in your home anyway rather than buying mini make-up kits, portable fans or travel hairbrushes.
The reality is a lot of influencers are paid by marketing teams to promote places or products, as well as being invited on press trips to experience destinations for free. As such, they’re under pressure to portray a destination in a positive light, and by being realistic about flaws or bad experiences, they risk losing income. Who would want to pay someone to badmouth their travel firm? On the other hand, as a travel journalist, you’re never paid (or you certainly shouldn’t be) to visit a destination on a press trip and honesty is expected (although issues of impartiality and integrity arise in traditional journalism too).
But conversely, as followers flock to de-influencers who tell it like it is, their word becomes more valuable and their honest praise of a destination means more, because it hasn’t been bought. Brave firms who know they have something good to offer invite this kind of challenging influencer along because they know it can work for them, providing it all goes well. They are still technically influencers, of course, but they’re doing it in a more honest way.
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Another TikTok influencer, Isabelle Lieblin has been on a similar tack, but with travel products. She runs through unnecessary items that Amazon is trying to sell travelers, highlighting just how much you don’t need the latest travel blanket to have a good trip–any good blanket from home will do the job just as well.
Emily DeAngelis (unicornblondie11 on TikTok) is one of many influencers posting about overhyped travel bags like the influencer-trendy Beis Weekender duffle travel bag (RRP:USD$131). “Save your hundred dollars,” she says, “And buy something else.”
Zero Waste Store, also on TikTok, is doing something similar, championing using items you have in your home anyway rather than buying mini make-up kits, portable fans or travel hairbrushes. As she says about travel razors: “I don’t know why you can’t just bring your normal razor with you!” You could sau this whole category of ‘travel essentials’ really isn’t essential at all.
Others, including British influencer Phoebe Moon, recommend reviewing how you travel as well as what you take with you, advocating for using public transport in Europe and staying at two-star hotels rather than the boujie hotels so many influencers champion.
This kind of honesty is refreshing in an industry built on hype and clicks. There are rising financial incentives out there for influencers to ‘sell’ destinations and experiences as perfect. In 2023, it was reported that 70 percent of travel brands use influencer marketing—what that means is these brands are spending money to pay influencers to create (mostly idealized) travel content that serves their needs: Sales.
Big travel brands have never spent more on marketing—including paying influencers—than they do right now: Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb and Trip.com broke all previous records when it came to marketing spend in 2023, with Expedia in particular focusing on developing options to help influencers sell more of their products.
In an algorithm-driven social media world, replicating what’s popular is nothing new and also unsurprising, as London-based influencer and digital content creator Candace Salters of Candace Abroad notes: “It can be that an influencer sees another influencer’s post perform well so they think, ‘I’m going to replicate that’,” she says. “One person finds a hidden gem, another person copies it, and then it becomes overhyped.”
She cites a post about where to get the best hot chocolate in Paris which shows a highly ‘Instagrammable’ spot, and then a follow-up de-influencer post that calls it out for being a place that looks good on screen but is actually terrible in real life. It’s another example, if you needed one, that Instagram life is not real life, that travel taste varies from person to person, and that it’s worth doing your research before you book travel anywhere. With social media coming under fire for stoking overtourism, fueled by unrealistic images, it’s important for the future of the industry that we look beyond superficial shots and ask what it’s really like.
“Deinfluencing is a good thing,” says Salters. “For my audience, primarily in the US, they have super limited PTO [paid time off] and the cost of living is rising. How you spend your money matters. If it can help people avoid bad recommendations that are viral hits and spend their money in places that are actually good—not just good on screen—then it’s a good thing overall.”
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Laura Hall is an award-winning writer, journalist and author of titles including Time Out Copenhagen, Footprint Reykjavik and One Day, So Many Ways, a children’s book about how life is lived around the world. A former travel guide editor, she’s run communications for a travel start-up and led global content at a tourist board. She now writes about Scandinavia and the Nordics for BBC Travel, Kinfolk, Time Out, The Times, Lonely Planet and others.
