What should you do if you make a cultural faux pas on your travels? We asked an expert

Imagine going on vacation, posting a funny video to make everyone laugh back home, and then… making international news because of a mistake in said video.

On a recent visit across the Atlantic, this happened to American TikToker Liz White, who happens to be one of my good friends from college. She got stuck in traffic on a road trip around the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland, posted a funny TikTok video about getting stuck in an “Irish parade,” and ended up with 3 million views, a mention on a BBC broadcast, and headlines in the Irish News and beyond about her ‘apology TikTok.’

As many of her thousands of commenters educated her on the post and in DMs, it was not a cute Irish parade that she had stumbled upon. Instead, it was a demonstration from the Orange Order. If you’re unfamiliar with this group—as I was, before I saw Liz post about all this—it’s a Protestant group in Northern Ireland that has clashed with Catholics. Typically, they would not refer to themselves as “Irish.”

Among the more than 7,000 comments Liz’s video generated on TikTok are many along the lines of, “CALLING THE ORANGE ORDER AN IRISH PARADE I’M IN STITCHES,” and “bopping away with a tricolour bracelet to an orange order march – iconic.”

Because I know Liz, I know that she’s smart, thoughtful, and a conscientious traveler, and I know this was a totally innocent mistake. It also made me realize how easily something like this could have happened to me… If you travel often, your next cultural faux pas is also possibly not a matter of if but when.

Ultimately, Liz’s faux pas turned out to be more entertaining than offensive, and I imagine this has a lot to do with the way she handled it. Instead of pulling the post down or getting defensive, she pinned it and followed up with additional posts explaining her mistake, providing cultural context, and thanking everyone who reached out. She admitted she had not yet gotten to that episode in Derry Girls, a series about teenage life amid the conflict between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and resolved to get caught up.

This was exactly the right thing to do, according to expert advice about how to handle a faux pas. “Apologizing or responding in the moment may facilitate damage control, but the real learning comes when you use self-reflection to transform your mistake into a cross-cultural lesson you can use,” the co-authors of a book called Forging Bonds in a Global Workforce wrote in the Harvard Business Review. In short, they recommend five basic steps to avoid and respond to cultural faux pas:

1. Get over yourself and acknowledge the mistake
2. Start studying, so you can better understand cultural context
3. Stay calm and figure out whether you can laugh it off or need to offer a serious apology
4. Engage in self-reflection
5. Ask for help from someone who’s able and willing to offer you feedback

Liz did all of these things, thoughtfully and with a good dose of charm and charisma to boot. According to YouTube channel Sorry You Went Viral,” which did a whole seven-minute segment about the scenario, she’s forgiven: “Arguably, she’s done her bit for those who are Irish history afficionados,” said journalist Hannah Vaughan Jones, who hosts the show.

So, I called Liz to get the whole story, and to chat with her about how she dealt with it.

Adventure.com: So, tell us the story. What happened here?

Liz White: So, I went to Ireland to see Taylor Swift, as we Americans were doing. After the concert, I was traveling from Ireland to Northern Ireland with my parents. We got stuck in standstill traffic passing through County Donegal. People started getting out of buses with instruments, and they were dressed in orange. They were all just having a good time. I rolled down my window because I was like, “Okay, well we’re stuck here in traffic, I might as well enjoy the music and enjoy the vibes. How funny that we get caught in this Irish parade on our way through Ireland.”

I took a little snippet of video and I put it on my Instagram story first. All of my American friends were like, “This is so cool that you just got stuck in an Irish parade, how cute.” So I put it on TikTok, thinking nothing of it. And then it turns out it was not an Irish parade. It was for the Orange Order, which I had not heard of, and did not know anything about it. But, uh, I’ve learned a lot about it since then.

I was rocking out. I had the tricolor, the Ireland colors, on a friendship bracelet on my wrist from the concert, which apparently also is a no-no. Some people said I was lucky, that people in the parade could have gotten violent if they’d seen me wearing those colors.

How did your followers respond to it?

People definitely were DMing me. They were in the comments like, “Hey girl…” There were lots of messages telling me what I’d done wrong. But it was a good learning experience.

I think some people, at first, thought that I was joking, because they thought it was so funny and clever that I would call it an “Irish parade.” Once people realized I wasn’t joking, they were just trying to educate me. Overall, the vibe of the comments was just people who were laughing at me, which is fine—I’d rather be laughed at than yelled at.

How did it feel when you got all of those messages?

After I posted it, I didn’t check my TikTok for a few hours. When I opened it, there were tons of messages, so I was just immediately overwhelmed. I looked at it and realized what I did, and I think I put up an apology video or an explanation within 30 minutes. I wanted to get on top of it and let people know: I didn’t know what was happening here, but I’m learning.

Someone suggested you needed to watch more Derry Girls.

Yeah, I think I had watched like one or two episodes before I left on the trip. I like to do research before I travel, so I wanted to watch it before I traveled there. Then people were commenting that what had happened to me was just like this one episode of Derry Girls where they do get caught in an Orange Order parade, so I watched that episode that night. And, yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what happened to me—except they knew what was going on.

Looking back now, did anything seem weird in the moment?

Not really. The people who were going to the parade were all just having a good time together. You could tell they all knew each other, they were friends. I did ask someone who was passing by where they were headed, and they said, “A parade,” but they described it with a term I wasn’t familiar with and I had no service so I couldn’t Google anything. I just had no knowledge.

I don’t know what else I could have learned. A lot of people commented and said, ‘This is why you learn about the history of a country before you go to the country,’ which is true to a sense. But I doubt most people are sitting down and reading the history book of different countries before they go to them. I actually was reading a historical fiction book I had started on the plane, because I like to learn a little bit before I go, but it was just about the potato famine. It didn’t cover the Orange Order.

Is there anything you would do differently next time? Has this experience changed the way that you post about places, or the types of research you think you might do?

I would think more about what I’m posting in terms of whether it’s accurate, like if I’m saying “this is an Irish parade,” then fact- checking and finding out if that’s true or not before I post it. It seems like the Irish people generally had a pretty good perception of it at the end. People were messaging me and calling me an Irish celebrity because I was all over the news and stuff, and they were all like, “you have to come back.” I also had maybe two people from the Orange Order reach out and say, “Oh, you should come to our next parade!”

I did not take them up on that.