let's talk about your eurosummer
the perils of disneyland travel + interrogating those "expectation vs reality" travel tiktoks
as we’re well past the full modern phenomenon of european summer travel, some things have come up for me of late. for one - tiktok keeps feeding me travel “instagram vs reality” content. I’ve seen Positano, Santorini, Mykonos, Venice, general ones about the Greek islands, and every other popular summer destination - each depicting chaos, disorganization, carrying heavy suitcases up and down flights of stairs, heat, and unbearable crowds.
I’ll admit - I talk a big game, but tiktok keeps feeding me this content because prior to visiting Santorini, I consumed this content hungrily, eager to arrive on the island prepared to deal with elbow-to-elbow crowds. and you know? i stand by that. i wasn’t wrong, it really was elbow-to-elbow crowds. but here’s the thing: i’ve been traveling internationally frequently on my own for the last decade. it wasn’t always like this.
this summer, it felt like all of the under-35 writers from brooklyn were hanging out in Paris and getting dinner together. this summer, i went to Bali for the first time in years and was shocked at a) how white it is now, and b) how it no longer belongs to the islanders, but to the digital nomads. this summer, all the travel magazines were crowing about Croatia. Croatia in 2017 was lovely - Dubrovnik already close to its peak, but you could walk through the old city’s walls right before closing and have them all to yourself. and yet, Croatia in the last five years has gotten so crowded and expensive that people are finding their alternative in Albania.
Albania is beautiful, but respectfully - please leave Albania alone. for that matter, in the last five years, and especially since borders have reopened after closing with covid, summer tourism has swelled so rapidly that there is nowhere truly “under the radar.”
in Bali, Ubud now has crossfits and co-working spaces and I was the only asian person in the vicinity of the monkey forest. Canggu is basically a suburb of Melbourne. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in Indonesia to eat an acai bowl or pancakes or drink a flat white. sacred mountains have been turned into drive-in movie theaters for hundreds of jeeps: the movie is the sunrise. Bali gets its rice now from other places, because farmers have sold their rice paddies to foreigners or for hotels, and gone to work in tourism. Bali is so naturally beautiful, and of course there’s so much of the island that’s still natural and rural Indonesia, where there aren’t westerners complaining about roosters waking them up at dawn. but chiefly, it’s this impulse, to look at a place that’s natural and rural and abides by its own religious and cultural laws and principles, and to think: this place needs a crossfit.
to put on my carrie bradshaw “i couldn’t help but wonder” hat, what happened?
here’s my most amateur stab at it (i’m not a travel sociologist): I think social media, relentless capitalism, and the desire to partake in a beautiful place and have that experience for yourself without participating in local community, have turned whole countries and cities into Disneyland-like places.
travel is more democratic now, and more people can afford to fly and take their bucket list trips - I’m all for that! go to Santorini with your boo for your honeymoon!
the thing is, people post vacation snaps from their trips (I’m guilty of this - probably a prime offender) and everyone thinks “that looks beautiful! I’d also like to go!”
and so, when your coolest friend posted about the sunsets in Oía in 2010 or 2012, with some of the most unrealistically beautiful photos you’ve ever seen, it became lodged in your brain that you would like to go to Santorini to see that sunset in person. and so, Santorini, a volcanic island that used to be so poor because of its barren land, and because it was difficult to cultivate crops, became known for its sunsets. people started to come to the island for the famous sunsets, and tourism infrastructure started to develop around it.
here’s the thing - you can’t give an island that used to be poor (Santorini, Bali) a relatively easy way to get out of poverty and make real money (working as a tour guide, or running a sunset cruise company, or turning their homes into vacation rentals) and expect people not to take it. so Oía, and the village next to it, Finikia, is almost entirely hotels with rooftop pools and Airbnbs. and Ammoudi Bay, famous for seafood and the sisterhood of the traveling pants, went from a tiny fishing port to tiktok-famous seafood destination and the site where every tourist gets on a sunset catamaran.
walk through Santorini on a given morning and you’ll see the flying dress photos being set up. i didn’t realize until Bloomberg reported on this - bestie, this is a whole ass industry. there’s a whole industry now around providing tourists their bucket list photos wearing a dramatic dress flying in the wind in a dream locale - and folks pay for hair, makeup, dresses, transport, and getting to the island in the first place. the packages can go up to a thousand dollars for a single set of photos. I mean, if you’re posting and commissioning those photos - you make the money, you do whatever you want. but when a city/island/region gives up its original source of income in order to chase tourism money that seemingly falls out of the sky every summer, I don’t blame the islanders one bit. if you had a way to make almost-instant money that involved taking the exact same photo three times a day, every day for three months, wouldn’t you also take it?
the issue here, though, is that for tourists, they arrive at the island just for the sunset photo from Oía Castle or their flying dress photoshoot, spend three days taking photos from every photo spot, eat at restaurants around the caldera that they post on tiktok, and then leave. the entire village of Oía effectively is reduced to a playground, a giant backdrop for vacation pictures. tourists take the island as a natural photo backdrop where they can dine well with views of the caldera for thousands of likes, and then return home with the most valuable souvenir: beautiful pictures of Santorini.
i can’t speak for Santorini - i’m not from the island, not Greek, and will never claim to be a local - but my sense is that Santorini, like every place where people actually live, is a real, live, human place where people work, eat, play, cry, have families, are born and die. and yet, every summer, tourism turns it into a place that exists solely as a photo backdrop for content creators.
of course, the Greeks who grew up going to the Cycladic islands every summer for a decade will tell you about how they have changed with tourism money and popularity, but when the fifth influencer on my FYP is complaining about how crowded Santorini is, I almost want to shake them and say you are part of the problem. we all are. there’s no going back from here. there’s no way to undo what we’ve done.
now - I want to be clear here - tourism itself isn’t the issue. I think, if we are to call ourselves travelers and not tourists (tiktok is not original - the debate has existed since 2010’s-era travel blogs, arguably before), we have a responsibility to the places we visit to not make them worse. to treat them with care; to be as unobstructive as possible in our presences; to not interrupt, dilute, or take over the traditions that are such a big part of their history and culture. we have a responsibility to give back to the communities we pass through, and to pass through gently. if we love a place, or loved our experience and time there, we have a responsibility to help them out when they need it.
I’m not saying don’t go to Santorini or Bali. I know they’re dream destinations for many, and if you worked hard for your vacation, go wherever the fuck you want. all i’m saying is this - try to buy local products from local communities. eat at family-owned restaurants, not a Nobu outpost. tip after your meals. don’t make impossible requests of the people who work there. be nice. try to understand a bit more about the island and its history. and if anything befalls the island and there are aid campaigns, you’d better damn well donate.
we also have a responsibility to acknowledge our role in Disneyfying islands, cities, and regions. Disneyland exists solely for tourism, photos, and your fun vacation - but countries and cities and islands are so much more than your summer vacation, or a photograph with a castle. long after you run out of throwbacks to post from your Santorini vacation, it is the islanders who have to pick up the pieces. it is the islanders who have to deal with rising costs (a simple pita gyro has gone from 2 euros to almost 6 euros), who have to deal with being priced out of their lifelong homes or their livelihoods being destroyed.
and look - please stop complaining about the crowds in Oía or at the Acropolis. do you know who’s in those crowds? you.