When you travel, the real journey isn't photographed

Last week, I played tour guide for some visitors from overseas - first in London, and then in my hometown. It was exhausting, but it came with an unexpected side effect: it made me see those places differently. It’s hard to take your city for granted when you walk familiar streets with somebody seeing them for the first time. It snaps you out of your tunnel vision.

But while it opened my eyes to details I usually overlook, visiting the hotspots also made me realise how hollow most modern travel really is.

My most memorable trips tend to leave a lasting impression because they offer a glimpse of life in a different place. That usually happens when I visit friends in their home countries. The highlights are rarely the popular sights, but parts of the local lifestyle that I want to adopt and bring home with me.

Even when I don’t know anybody in town and spend more time on the beaten track, my takeaways often come from small details - the story behind an unusual item on a restaurant menu, or a museum exhibit that makes me think about how people used to live and the way the city evolved.

That kind of encounter demands real engagement with a place - you learn something about the world, and it changes you. But city breaks increasingly seem like a checklist - the top ten Trip Advisor attractions, each dutifully photographed like digital collectables in an open-world video game. Beyond the photos and landmarks, it’s easy to miss the soul of a place entirely.

That’s why parts of my London tour felt so disheartening. My guests got a small taste of London life, with some personal recommendations and home-cooked meals, but it’s hard to imagine anybody zig-zagging between tourist spots to compile their end-of-trip Instagram carousel ever would.

And when the photo matters more than the moment, etiquette goes out the window. The city becomes a mere backdrop, in front of which dense crowds jostle for their 20 seconds posing against the railings. Nothing is really absorbed. Why bother, when everything’s already captured on disk?

Sadly, this outlook on travel also seems to be influencing the way our cities are being shaped. The classic London landmarks (the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and so on) were all primarily built for function - albeit with a healthy layer of beauty on top. It was coincidental that their history and aesthetics makes them worth visiting so much later.

Most attractions built since the turn of the millennium (the London Eye, the Shard, the Sky Garden) are little more than glorified viewing platforms. Some might argue that we’ve simply forgotten how to build beautiful places, and that modern buildings are bland regardless of their purpose. But elevated points for tourists to take photos also seem to have taken precedence over the construction of aesthetically pleasing public infrastructure.

Will we ever change course? Never say never, but it doesn’t look likely in the near future. Tourists are happy to visit somewhere offering a good photo opportunity, and those building these places make too much money - if not from admittance, which is sometimes free as a planning condition, from the gift shops and pricey restaurants and bars that are never too far away.

Trends are hard to reverse, but there are personal antidotes. Travel is more rewarding when you embark on a trip with curiosity, rather than a checklist. Ask questions, linger longer, read the plaques, and treat your destination as somebody’s home - not a product. You’ll be infinitely more likely to pick up on the details that make the whole endeavour worthwhile.