Anti-Tourism Trends To Destinations Promoted By Influencers, What's The Reason?

Illustration of influencers promoting tourist destinations (Pexels/Haley Black)

JAKARTA - Influencers on social media usually have a big influence on promoting vacation spots. However, recently there was a tourist trend where people chose not to visit tourist destinations promoted by influencers.

Quoted from The Mirror, this trend arose because there was an assumption that the promotion carried out by influencers made a tourist destination an overtourism. Asmallworld's social networking CEO, Jan Luescher, said that tourists eventually avoided the destinations promoted by influencers to avoid the place being too crowded.

The established tourist destination has gone viral on various social media platforms. Then it continues to be romanticized by influencers, thus encouraging more people to visit. Generation Z, the main users of this platform tend to appear in large numbers," said Jan Luescher, quoted on Tuesday, February 11, 2025.

One example of a destination that went viral thanks to influencers is Santorini in Greece. In 2013, when Instagram first got a lot of followers, the number of visitors began to increase sharply in Santorini to reach a total of 3.4 million tourists.

This figure even exceeds the number of permanent residents in Santorini, which only amounted to around 20 thousand people. Since then, Santorini has also been known as the 'Instagram Island' in Greece, with 8 million uploads given the hashtag #santorini on the platform.

Santorini Island is now flooded with visitors at any time and has finally imposed restrictions on visitors this year. In general, many people who visit tourist destinations promoted by influencers are generation Z or gen Z.

For this reason, tourists choose to visit places that many people don't know about, which provides them with wider space to do many things, including capturing photos. This tends to be done by the millennial generation, X, to the considerationful gen Z.

"Tourists are looking for a more personal journey, which is different from the travel plans that can be predicted and full of photo opportunities formed on social media," he said.

"Especially for millennials and X, and even some intelligent gen Z, to actively avoid destinations spread by influencers across social media platforms," he added.