Use Instagram to Find Places to Visit (and Avoid) on Vacation
One of the best things about any vacation is finding this unnoticed local attraction. Perhaps it’s the neighborhood bar that wowed you, a cultural monument rarely mentioned in guidebooks, or a terrific street-cart burrito. Jenna Wortham at The New York Times notes that Instagram is a great tool for finding places like this.
The key to Wortham here is simple: you get an unfiltered view of the city from multiple angles. Here’s how she explains it:
Viewing a raw feed of geotagged posts offers a real-time graphical map that you can comb to compose your own travel guide. I like to think of it as a surf camera. But instead of tuning in to see if the waves are too soft, the channels provide a sense of place that you can use to decide if a place feels fun and safe – whatever that means to you. And it became my compass, my way of navigating the world. Rather than dwelling on travel sites or printed travel guides, or bothering friends for recommendations, I check a new city or location tag right before I go there and see which recent posts are the most popular. What I see there is wildly unfiltered, refracted from multiple angles – and far more revealing than any other guide.
It’s not just about finding the best (and worst) places to visit, it’s also about getting to know different cultural discoveries. Worthham details the use of Instagram and other geolocation apps to figure out how to dress properly in specific places, find like-minded people hanging out, and learn about potential socio-political dangers in specific cities.
We already talked about using Tinder for similar purposes , which is working well now, but Instagram allows you to plan a little ahead and doesn’t require an app to connect, there is no excuse for most non-lonely people to Download. I also used Instagram for a similar purpose on my last vacation, mainly to stamp out things to do in New Orleans , including avoiding long lines and silly travel traps. It has also proven to be useful for tracking good happy hour trades. It works well, and the use of Wortham goes far beyond Instagram, so check out The New York Times for a few more ideas.
Turning Instagram Into A Travel Guide Without Filters | New York Times