“It’s not just posting pictures or writing articles,” says San Franciscan Melissa Lau (“Don’t let time constraints or lack of resources get in the way of your travel dreams,” @wanderfultraveler, 46.6k followers), on a video call from London. “There are so many other factors such as being professional about how to build collaborations, and networking and, like, learning things like photography and editing, SEO [search engine optimisation], writing and other different components.”

Defenders would say that what influencers do is light entertainment. A bit of beefcake or a sylph in swimwear seen in highly edited artificial perfection, captured with the swirl of a colourful dress in front of a national monument, throwing shapes on the edge of a precipice, or wading into a field of flowers, is filling much the same function for destinations as car show models do for vehicles, although typically with rather less product knowledge. But travel influencers often also pose as oracular reference sources.

Christina Vidal (“Pretty place, nice things, good wine,” @jetsetchristina, 84.2k followers) had apparently never heard of Bali before 2015, but given that she spends half the year on the Indonesian island you might expect her “Ultimate Bali Travel Guide” to be something special.

Nevertheless, although Bali “has something for everyone”, it’s apparently not the multitiered pagodas and delicately carved stonework of the thousands of temples. Nor is it haunting gamelan music, the Balinese themselves, or even their cuisine. She does offer plenty of restaurant recommendations, but they are for “Japanese-Latin Fusion”, pizza and smoothie bowls.

This might come as a surprise unless you’ve already paddled in the influencer pool. It’s often so shallow you’d break something if you dived in.

“Let me help you discover unique experiences beyond the normal sights and attractions of a city!” promises Lau on her site, although she offers little on London, where she’s currently resident. She does offer a “destination guide” to the Netherlands that consists merely of advice on how to shop there on the German and American versions of Amazon. Her guide to Los Angeles amounts to a list of the city’s best Korean restaurants, in which not all of the dish names are correctly spelled.

So many influencers claim luxury travel as their “niche” that it must be standing-room only in there, although few appear to have had much experience in their chosen field.

Taiwan-born New Yorker Wendy Hu (“Design the life you want to live,” @nomadicfare, 60.2k followers), who has had a commercial relationship with Shangri-La hotels, is genuinely impressed that the company’s Hong Kong Island property changes the carpets in its lifts to reflect the day of the week.

Issues around paid content aside, are we really looking to people this naive for advice?

Calculating the rate of return on investing in influencers has always been a problem. How many followers read a post then book, and how many just want to be the influencer, luxuriating gratis?

“We look at the engagement rate – the number of followers in relation to the comments, likes, shares that we can see on the respective posts,” says Matthias Schwindl, of the Vienna Tourist Board. “The large ones usually have a great amount of followers but engagement on the various posts is rather small.”

François Michel, of the tourism office in the pretty Swiss canton of Vaud, agrees. “Now we are not looking at influencers who are attracting millions of people and we are much more concentrating on serving niche influencers, who attract maybe an audience who is interested in wine and gastronomy, for instance.”

While journalists are offered access behind the scenes and experts to interview, and big influencers get paid to broadcast specific messages, lesser influencers get itineraries to Instagrammable spots.

“I want to have that influencer come twice or three times a year maybe,” says Schwindl, “so that people say, ‘Oh I know he’s been here before. He really knows what’s going on in the city.’”

Or, at least, appears to do so.

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Regardless, much of the engagement from followers tends to be in the form of “looking good babe” or “really like that dress”, suggesting it’s the influencer that’s the object of attention, not her location.

“Engagement rate is the state of the art right now but there’s something more to come,” agrees Schwindl. “We can never say because of this post X amount of people then decided to come to Vienna,” he admits, although featured hotels may show bumps in bookings.

Individuals with real-world fame can certainly have a measurable impact, though, says Michel, citing one Indian film star who came to Montreux.

“I think he took one picture of himself playing Freddie Mercury in front of the statue. And then six months after that, the Switzerland tourism office in India got tons of requests from tour operators and agencies saying, ‘All our clients are asking for trips to Montreux, to see the Freddie Mercury statue.’”

But the engagement by followers of solely online influencers is often merely aspirational, as a 2017 Travel+Leisure magazine article about them admitted.

“Even if you don’t have the means to make a similar excursion, it’s still fun to live vicariously. That’s what [Instagram] is all about, right?” But vicarious spending is not money in the bank.

If 2019 was a poor year for the image of travel influencers, 2020 was a more comprehensive catastrophe. As borders closed to stop the advance of Covid-19, chances to earn cash from generating content collapsed, along with the prospect of making a living by swanning around the globe to pose prettily in something skimpy.

Influencers who found ways around travel restrictions while everyone else was still locked down risked a further backlash. “Reality stars and influencers under fire from Home Secretary for ‘showing off in the sun’ while rest of Britain is under lockdown,” ran a January headline in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper.

Vidal “started pivoting into lifestyle content”, she says. “You know, people have followed me for years and years, they know that I’m not just travel. I also am my own personality.

“I don’t have to be at an overwater bungalow in the Maldives for someone to be interested in what Christina is doing,” she says, speaking from an overwater bungalow in the Maldives; one also recently visited by Hu.

Justifications for their wanders verge on the messianic, with talk of tourism boards needing influencers to show everyone that it’s still possible to travel safely. Influencers are also, they say, putting food on the table for the snorkel guide and the man working the boat.

Now it’s not save the whale, but save the whale-watcher.

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Hu and Lau have continued free­lancing, tapping their past marketing-related employment, and Vidal has her own line of swimwear to sell. Peddling their own products, commonly clothing, is the next move for many influencers.

Lau has sensibly thought it safer to stay at home in London, which is still a foreign place for most of her followers, but has also tried virtual reporting. “I did a Skype call with one of the properties I was supposed to visit earlier in the year and they actually talked me through some of their culinary experiences and some things about their property, then did a little video tour.” About which you can read on her site.

Another lockdown option for influencers has been “mentoring”.

“This is your year! It’s time to uplevel your life,” urges Megan McDonough (“The world is made of magic and so are you!” @itsmeganeileen, 46.4k followers).

McDonough marks her postings with “all my opinions are my own”, which is perhaps regrettable because almost anyone else’s would be more interesting. She observes of one Costa Rica resort, “Between yummy food and Yoga, I felt lighter both physically and mentally,” although any more lightweight and she’d need strapping to the massage table.

Hu disapproves of mentoring in general. “I talk to people now and they, like, graduate from college or don’t graduate from college and their goal is to be, like, an influencer. That’s very bizarre to me,” she says. “Doing this is difficult. So I don’t know what people think it is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t what reality is.”

But when were reality and influencing ever seen together?

Post-Covid-19, spending one week in Bali and the next in Bora Bora may be seen as an environmentally damaging solecism, a point no influencer seems capable of addressing.

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“I hate when I’m at a luxury resort and there’s plastic water bottles or there’s reef-unsafe sunscreen. It bothers me. It’s a pet peeve,” says Vidal, avoiding the wider issue.

But isn’t eco-tourism staying at home?

“That’s a good line,” she says, but prefers to talk about “sustainable luxury resort brands”. The point that influencers are part of the 1 per cent creating half of all aviation emissions is not going to be addressed.

Perhaps it’s time we started our own clothing line, and printed on a T-shirt, “Save the planet: ground the travel influencers.”

But Covid-19 has done that already.