As the world finally shed the last of pandemic-related border restrictions and requirements, the last year was a particularly big one when it came to travel.
Airports around the world struggled to contain the rush of people taking long-awaited trips while, in the U.S., spending on outgoing travel surpassed what was spent in 2019 by more than $2 billion. Airlines have also responded to the demand both by increasing its service to major cities such as London and launching new routes to destinations like Mexico’s Tulum and Portugal’s Faro amid skyrocketing popularity.
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As every year, frequent travelers and influencers have also popularized certain ways of travel that contributed to overtourism or otherwise rubbed many the wrong way. In its ranking of “10 Terrible Travel Trends That We Do Not Want To See In 2024,” Fodor’s Travel Guide placed “traveling like a local” at the very top.
Travelers jump into blue water off a boat.
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What is ‘traveling like a local’ (and why actual locals hate it)
The trend can best be described as the growing traveler interest to “not look like a tourist” and visit places where other tourists are not going in order to appear more cultured. Google Trends (GOOGL) – Get Free Report searches for “how not to look like a tourist” soared throughout the year while the New York Times published multiple articles about how not to look like one in New York, Paris or while wearing certain shoes.
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“Accept that you don’t have the local knowledge of the place you’re visiting and that locals have a different outlook formed on a much deeper understanding of a place than you do,” Scott Laird writes in the ranking.
Other annoying “travel behaviors” singled out by the travel guide publisher include calling any and all vacations as a type of “moon” (not just honeymoon but also “babymoon,” “solomoon” and “buddymoon”) and shaming other tourists’ choice to go to major attractions instead of off-the-beaten-path destinations.
These other travel behaviors were rated as particularly annoying
“It’s unnecessary to yuck someone else’s yum in the travel space,” Laird writes. “If someone’s excited about going to Paris, don’t decry it as a tourist trap. If they’re raving about the safari they went on, saying it was ‘too Americanized’ probably isn’t the most tactful response.”
The authors also poked fun at TikTok-popular terms like “destination dupes” which compare a smaller city with a larger and more expensive one while ignoring the things that make each worth visiting in its own right along with over-reliance on bucket lists. They also called out “gawker tourists” who went to Hawaii just to see the devastation caused by the deadly wildfires that completely destroyed the historic town of Lahaina.
The AI-written guidebooks that started to appear on the internet in the early part of 2023 also caught Fodor’s attention. Many were later uncovered to be scams that were pulled from Wikipedia entries but presented as being written by humans in order to get people going to certain places to buy them.
“These guidebooks, shoddily written with AI from information pulled from the internet (and not verified or fact-checked), have proliferated and made travel planning more confusing for travelers, and it’s time they go,” writes Laird.
