Authenticity Is the New Tourist Trap

By Melissa Baykan

Photo by Ella Xu

To be authentic is to stay true to your values and beliefs in order to live openly as yourself. Travelers have recently embraced the trending idea of prioritizing authenticity in order to experience what they imagine culture to be in its purest form: as a local, an insider, but definitely not as the stereotypical tourist.

Over the last decade, the label of a tourist has taken on increasingly negative connotations, deteriorating from a simple title of foreigners exploring an unfamiliar country to an ugly word that characterizes someone as clueless, loud, lost, ignorant, and especially vulnerable to traps and scams. It has degraded into an element of exposure, revealing someone’s pretend, performative effort to fit into a new culture. As tourists, people are often grouped as the same, stripped of individuality, and especially for Americans, stereotyped as disrespectful to local customs and traditions.

As travelers, many of us want and try to avoid looking like tourists, from the clothes we wear to the restaurants we eat at. This common desire to distance ourselves from such stereotypes is completely understandable and valid, but the real tension comes from the need to prove that we are meeting the unspoken requirements of authentic travel. However, authenticity is often confused with living like a local, and this loss of identity and pressure to imitate an unknown lifestyle counterintuitively hold people back from truly enjoying their travels. Now, this push to move away from the look of a tourist has had a commercial effect: many tour companies have started to utilize the rise of the buzzword “authentic” to brand their itineraries and travel packages to eager consumers. I can’t help but wonder—is there really a right way to travel?

Perhaps a local in Buenos Aires invites an American tourist to join them at a McDonald’s, and the tourist declines so they can search for and dine in a more Argentine restaurant. Though trying new cuisines is a perfect gateway into understanding a foreign culture, accepting the invitation would not make the traveler any less authentic than anyone else, and sharing that meal could offer an equally meaningful glimpse into the local’s life. Therefore, marking one experience as authentic over the other may unintentionally suggest that other parts of everyday life in that country are less representative simply because they do not match what the visitors expect to find.

A culture does not become any less real when it includes something recognizable to us, and acknowledging this variety of lifestyles allows us to travel without expecting locals to confirm the image we bring from home. Ultimately, wanting to understand how people live is a meaningful reason to travel, but it does not require us to pretend that we share their lives or abandon our own preferences.

Being a traveler does not mean you should abandon what you like, love, dislike, or hate. It is not tourists versus travelers, or them versus us. As soon as we leave our homes, we are all tourists, and we are all equally responsible for respecting the culture, environment, customs, beliefs, and traditions in the regions we travel to.

What matters is how we approach these destinations: with curiosity rather than prejudice, and appreciation rather than bleak imitation. To successfully integrate into and experience a different culture does not require a performance, but an honest acceptance of who the traveler really is and what they want to take out of the trip. What is truly authentic, truly real, and truly genuine, during your travels is you.