If you visit a luxury hotel and don’t broadcast every inch of it to Instagram, did it really happen? If you drink a coffee and don’t take a photo of it, was it really that good? If you visit a top tier restaurant and don’t rate it on Tripadvisor was the whole night a waste of time?
Travel in 2021 is full of questions, and that’s before we even talk about COVID-19. Fortunately, despite this being a year of much doom and gloom, New Zealand is on hand to lighten the mood.
Highlighting a tourism sin we’re all probably guilty of these days, the country’s new tourism campaign makes fun of those of us who travel under the “social influence.”
The campaign comprises of a two-minute skit starring comedian Tom Sainsbury as a member of the “Social Observation Squad (SOS).”
Sainsbury, dressed as a national park ranger, follows tourists to some of New Zealand’s most famous landscapes and tells them to stop travelling “under the social influence.”
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“I’ve been alerted to a situation that’s been happening a lot lately,” he says at the start of the video. “People have been seeing those photos on social media, and they’re going to great lengths to copy them.”
“You know [the sort]…Hot tub back shot. Man sits quietly on the rock contemplating. Hot dog legs.”
The campaign’s message? Stop mimicking photos you see online and “share something new” instead, CNN Travel reports.
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A DMARGE correspondent recently found this out the hard way, when he went to visit one of Australia’s most Instagram famous waterfalls, and came (socially) a cropper attempting to get that perfect picture.
It’s also a huge topic of conversation in Australia’s Byron Bay, where some locals are revolting against a perceived invasion of Instagram fame-seeking hordes.
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Browsing through the Instagram geotags and hashtags of popular tourist destinations and accommodations, it becomes clear the ‘under the social influence’ phenomenon has gone global.
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Not that we don’t love behind the scenes glimpses at the world’s most luxurious locales, but once you’ve seen one drone hype reel, you’ve seen them all.
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The ‘heavenly linen, beautiful balcony, pool, clifftop’ clip is amazing. But it’s overdone. In fact, we’d bet our last Bintang people prefer down to earth insights or moments like the following, than ‘same old, same old.’
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Food for thought.