On YouTube Travel Influencers and Self-Deception

When we all agree something because we all say it is true

This is something that’s been sort of niggling at the back of my mind for some time, and something that I’ve been a little reluctant to try and put into words. Not out of fear of offending people, but because I wasn’t sure if it was an annoyance that was genuine or perhaps one born out of jealousy. With my recent travels to Transnistria and Moldova however, I do feel that a certain breed of travel influencer are cultivating a mass delusion about certain destinations, portraying them as the sum of their strangest parts, to the detriment of the real character of the place.

You all know the ones I mean, the titles designed to lure you in “The Most SHOCKING City in Europe” or “Avoid the MOST DANGEROUS Place in Asia!”, bold typefaces superimposed over open-mouthed image of the conspicuous host, overwrought captions that don’t really tell you what the video is about, and, usually, a sponsored link to a VPN or drone manufacturer for a nice ad-break.

I don’t have a very high opinion of influencers in general, and some travel ones can really take the biscuit. Just this weekend an Instagram influencer was trying to shill her £2,600 trip to Georgia, and hadn’t even bothered to learn how to pronounce Caucuses. I don’t understand how a person can have so much contempt for the people they’re trying to sell to not do the most basic research into a trip they’re “leading”. That, and the constant shilling of crap, the same stuff but from a different manufacturer each week “I SWEAR by this face cream”, “I’m OBSESSED with this bag”, only for it never to be seen again. Maybe it’s my innate cynicism and allergy to hyperbole, but I just see this as an unsustainable and ultimately damaging form of marketing, partly for those who are being sold to, but mostly for the influencers themselves.

So why did I do myself the disservice of watching videos from travel influencers when I could just look at a Brandt or Lonely Planet travel guide? Honestly, one day I had a stinker of a hangover following several bottles of Prosecco shared with a friend on his canal boat, and I wasn’t much in the mood to do anything but find a new form of self-flagellation. Before my trip to Transnistria I also was a bit worried, the FCDO advises against all travel to the region, and I had no real idea what to expect there, or in Moldova for that matter. I was also intrigued by the train we took, which seems to be a bit of a travel vlogger favourite. So, with a banging headache and a sense of self-hatred, I started to watch.

A free street concert for Romanian Language Day 2024 in Chișinău

Initially, all was fine, just some people on trains or in cars, explaining where they’re going, usually parroting the same lines about “The last remaining part of the USSR”, but its the focus on the negative that really bothers me. Poverty porn, showing people heroically buying things from impoverished pensioners who are selling off broken remote controls or windfall apples from their garden. People who have been failed by the system and now eke out a living for their final days selling what they can to supplement their meagre pensions (in Transnistria this can be as low as $9 a month). Supporting people is fine and we have to exercise compassion when travelling, but not at the cost of exploitation. I bought some extra soviet pins from a 94 year old man at the flea market, mostly because I did feel sorry for him, but filming it is grotesque when it positions the host as a benevolent philanthropist, recording people who likely have never even used YouTube and posting it up without their consent.

Beyond the human impact, the focus on a past that most countries, even Transnistria and especially Moldova, are trying to move away from is also damaging. Looking at the Soviet monuments and murals as a representation of a present that doesn’t exist is misrepresenting what these countries are truly like. It is one thing to look at them as an anomaly and stand alone works of art, but to use them as a symbol of a self-created fallacy about a place is fundamentally wrong. Let’s not forget, the USSR is gone, Lenin is dead, the Communist Party have no representation in the parliament of either country, and EU money is now flooding in as goods flow the other way. My guide in Transnistra wore Miu Miu and YSL, not identikit uniforms from State Factory 14 like the Vinylon clad citizens of North Korea, and she was also fun, friendly, and well travelled.

In Chișinău, the delightful and small capital of Moldova this brand of YouTuber focus on the abandoned National Hotel; once the InTourist hotel this massive building now sits crumbling, a far cry from the lavish parties and fine dining restaurants it once hosted. It’s just one building though - in a city of cathedrals, museums, and parks - one where cranes are hoisting up modern skyscrapers. Look up Chișinău on YouTube and see how long it takes to see the National Hotel. It won’t be long.

The Main Street in Chișinău, a modern and vibrant city

This is not to say we shouldn't look at the negative, travel is often difficult and unpleasant and requires reckoning with your own privilege and consumption. To focus fully on one aspect, and often not the defining aspect, of a place however is simply perpetuating a narrative that exists only to demonstrate how brave someone is, how they push the extremes of travel and continue unafraid into the abyss. An abyss you can get an airport bus to, and an abyss that is desperately trying to shake off the shackles of a painful history and move forward to a brighter future. An abyss that multiple people tell the exact same, exaggerated, story about.

Such is the extent of capitalism in places like Transnistria that whole shops exist to sell on Soviet tat. Old medals and badges, postage stamps, and tatty facsimiles of Misha the Bear -the 1980 olympic mascot- sell at vastly inflated prices. No one there wants these any more, but the fascination lingers in the west, and who can blame them for making some money whilst also removing the legacy of the USSR from their country. I have an excellent lamp commemorating the 1960 Vostok 1 launch that took Yuri Gagarin into space. I really like the Soviet design of homewares and have a few lampshades and glasses from that period. My friend, Liz, who grew up in Estonia and saw the difficult transition from the USSR to a free Estonia in the early 1990’s tells me that she’s glad these artefacts are making it to the collectors elsewhere, so they’re no longer in the countries that were damaged by Russian imperialism.

This group-think about misrepresenting places reminds me of the time I was at a truly dreadful, but painfully expensive restaurant. My day job means I often need to go and do degustations at the restaurants and hotels we sell our beer to, and on this occasion I was giving out tasters as part of a community event in the local area. All the shops and restaurants were doing open-houses, showing off their wares with workshops and tastings, giving people the chance to meet the faces behind the food.

I spent the day in a super-posh hotel restaurant, people in expensive designer clothing were coming for lunch, some to a table they occupied every Saturday, others for special occasions. As part of my day working I was able to get lunch on the house, an occasional perk of my job, and since I have very little shame I ordered one of the most expensive things on the menu. At £34 a small fillet of hake on a tomato and kale ragout with some bean cassoulet sounded pretty delicious, but when it came it was one of the most tasteless meals I’ve ever had. The fish had the most flavour, but unfortunately it was ammonia, the sign of a fish that’s long past its best, and shouldn't be served (and would be impossible to not realise when cooking). The rest was utterly bland, so under seasoned I doubt there was anything in there, and overcooked so even the vegetables had lost any natural flavour. A small and expensive plate of truly terrible cooking, and yet everyone else around me seemed to be enjoying theirs, as if the opulent surrounds of an overpriced five star hotel can somehow translate into delicious food, when we all know that it can’t. You can trick yourself into thinking that expensive and exclusive means it’s good, and if you surround yourself with likeminded people you’ll all come to believe the same delusion. The same is true of travel influencers who deliberately seek to misrepresent countries for clicks, and inspire others to come along and repeat the same crap so that the overwhelming messaging about a place is false. Just like we can all pretend a restaurant is good because we want to look good for having eaten there we can all pretend a country is different because we want to look good for having gone there.

All trends have finite lifespans, and my hope is this deliberate misrepresentation of destinations that really do deserve tourist to come and see the wonderful parts will die out (hopefully along with all the other influencers). Until then we have to work hard to find accurate accounts of destinations that we ought to go and visit for what they truly offer, not for perpetuating clickbait. It’s like saying that all there is to London is stabbings and weed, or all that America has to offer is MAGA and guns, and we all know that is not true.

For what it’s worth my boyfriend’s lunch was also completely tasteless and the coffee was appalling, so I don’t think it was only me who got a bad meal.