Checklist tourism is on the rise as travellers prioritise selfies over ‘real stories’

Flamingos are not native to Aruba, but that does not stop throngs of tourists from flocking to the island in the southern Caribbean Sea to pose with them every year. The privately-owned Flamingo Beach is artificially populated with the pink birds, and the only ways to get in are by staying at the Renaissance Wind Creek Aruba Resort or by picking up one of a couple of dozen day passes, which cost US$125 (HK$980) and sell out almost as quickly as Bad Bunny concert tickets. Travel blogger Shalyn Vukich went to Aruba in November 2020 specifically to get that iconic flamingo shot – she even packed an ocean-blue swimsuit to match the famously turquoise waters. Similarly, Suffolk, UK-based network marketing professional Connie Cardy packed matching pink outfits for her and her daughters ahead of their own influencer-inspired trip in October 2025. “One flamingo jabbed me several times,” Vukich says, adding it felt “like a zoo, or maybe even worse”. Cardy called it crowded and chaotic. Aruba is hardly the only place where tourists look for photo opportunities, turning the world’s grandest sites into social media backdrops. “You see it everywhere,” says Leigh Barnes, president for the Americas at Intrepid Travel. “People blitz through sites, tick the boxes and miss the real stories.” Such behaviour is almost as old as tourism itself, says Daniel Herszberg, a PhD candidate in socio-legal studies at the University of Oxford who focuses on tourism. From the earliest days of leisure travel in the 1800s, as the Grand Tour grew in popularity, cruise liner posters would advertise destinations alongside their famous monuments. That continued with early aviation ads in the 1950s: go to London to see Big Ben, for instance, or to India to see the Taj Mahal. “It’s how travel’s been sold for years,” Herszberg says. “Highlights only.” The tendency is exacerbated not only by social media and travel industry offerings, but also by limited holiday time. Katy Rockett, the regional director for North America at tour company Explore Worldwide, sees itineraries built around quick photo opportunities growing in popularity, be they in Paris or Bali, even as awareness of overcrowding and overtourism is on the rise. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting the magical Eiffel Tower shot,” Herszberg says. However, when the entire focus of a trip becomes checking a spot off your list by taking one primed-for-social-media picture, the trip becomes “much less about the very things that draw many people to travel in the first place: curiosity and exploration,” he says. Pain points At a certain scale, this type of photo-seeking tourism can be harmful to destinations. There are throngs of hot-air ballooners in Turkey’s Cappadocia region, who, unsatisfied with their sky-high shots, trespass through local farms and trample on sensitive volcanic rock to take landscape selfies from the so-called lovers’ rock. The heavy foot traffic is causing nearby monuments to crack and shift. “A high volume of people moving through a space quickly erodes landscapes and historical sites,” says Lisa Chen, chief executive officer of ToursByLocals, a platform that vets and sells tours run by independent guides. “Waste increases and pushes infrastructure beyond unsustainable limits,” she adds. Tudor Morgan, an expedition leader with the adventure cruise line HX Expeditions, has witnessed this in the farthest reaches of Earth. “Some travellers view Antarctica as the ultimate box to tick,” he says. In his experience, some travellers choose HX specifically because of the expedition line’s focus on education and science, while others are prone to skipping lectures from scientists, climatologists or wildlife specialists that are part of the cruise line’s standard offering. Instead, Morgan says, they prioritise the perfect selfie in front of an iceberg or penguin colony. Finding solutions Governments are also thinking about how to encourage travellers to be more respectful of their prized sites. In recent years, they have tried to rein in checklist tourism everywhere from sacred Hawaiian beaches to Machu Picchu in Peru. So too have museums. These institutions have been dealing with the double-edged sword of social media for years, and so have become incubators for solutions. When Cecilie Hollberg took over as director of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, in 2020, she wanted to deepen the way visitors engage with the most famous of artworks: Michelangelo’s David. To encourage more of these museum-goers to linger post-selfie, she extended visiting hours, limited tour groups, invited Florentines for free community events and upgraded lighting systems to help illuminate smaller details in the sculpture. By the time attendance reached a record 2 million visitors in 2023, she says, the crowds actually felt lighter and more people could be seen taking in the art properly. For Bevin Savage Yamazaki, who works on culture and museum projects for the design firm Gensler, the Galleria’s changes felt palpable on her last family trip in 2025. (Neither she nor Gensler worked on the Galleria’s tune-ups.) “The timed entry, clearer circulation paths and more intentional interpretation have created a noticeably calmer rhythm in the galleries,” Savage Yamazaki says. “Instead of being swept along in a dense crowd, we were able to slow down together, to really take in the room, the light, the proportions, before arriving at the sculpture itself.” The difference from previous visits was stark. “The emotional impact returns,” she says. “You feel less like you’re consuming an icon and more like you’re in conversation with a masterpiece.” That same logic is why the Mona Lisa will get its own room at the Louvre by 2031. French President Emmanuel Macron said in January 2025 that the change would help manage increased attendance and address overcrowding, which is particularly felt in front of Da Vinci’s masterpiece. The catch? When it opens, you will have to pay extra for the privilege of staring into Mona Lisa’s eyes and contemplating her mysteries. Or, as it may well be, for the privilege of a selfie with her.

Checklist tourism is on the rise as travellers prioritise selfies over ‘real stories’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}From Paris to Turkey, tourists blitzing through sites for social media snaps are causing crowding and concerns that they’re missing the point

From Paris to Turkey, tourists blitzing through sites for social media snaps are causing crowding and concerns that they’re missing the point