The Rise of ‘Travel Like a Local’

By Zach Kaplan

Photograph by Ben Farkas

In cities all around the world, from London to Barcelona, tourists are increasingly fixated on one trend: living like a local. The trend is self-explanatory: why only go to the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, or the Big Ben in London, when you could go to a tapas bar packed with Catalonians or the local leather-ware shop where working-class London conversations abound.

A 2019 video essay on Quartz states that in 2017, more than five million visitors traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, making a ratio of nine tourists to every one local. The benefits of “live like a local” are obvious: a tremendous economic upside for those who want to leverage their lived experience and a deeper global understanding of what makes the top destinations culturally and societally unique.

During my time studying abroad, this was a focus of mine as I attempted to unlock a deeper understanding of a city’s pulse. Fortunately for me, there are plenty of tools to help trod the unbeaten path, such as GetYourGuide, Spotted by Locals and Atlas Obscura. Even cities themselves have beefed up their own tourist-catered apps in pursuit of this objective. 

A big part of “live like a local” is showing the world what you’re doing. On social media, experiences that feel unique are tokens to create envy. As the Quartz video pointed out, it’s about finding that warm croissant from the corner boulangerie and curating a Parisian aesthetic. 

One of the first to pursue this idea was the late Anthony Bourdain, whose adventures helped give birth to the ‘foodie’ culture central to this new trend. Mirroring the Bourdain experience means finding the small pocket community where no one speaks your language, finding the best local currywurst in Berlin, or the ultimate English breakfast outside of central London. 

A pasta-making class I did resulted in a homemade amatriciana pasta dish with authentic guanciale in Frascati, a community in the heart of Rome’s wine country once decimated by American counter-attacks in World War II. While that was authentic, a food tour in Berlin revealed the universality of the beloved Portuguese staple pastel de nata. 

Both of these tours were found and booked on GetYourGuide, which begs the question: is the old-fashioned method of going with the flow better, or do these apps, which gamify travel in pursuit of the most obscure activities, yield the best outcomes? 

These apps serve as an intermediary between the folks who run small businesses, seeking to meet those from all kinds of walks of life, and the tourists curious enough to meet them where they are. This led me to some lovely conversations with those folks at the wine-making class, meeting London and Liverpool natives, along with a few lovely ladies visiting Rome on a bachelorette party from the Netherlands.

However, the majority of the people who signed up for this wine-making class, an intimate exploration of the procurement and aging of various reds and whites in dank underbelly caves, were actually Americans. Several people were grouped up, coming from Utah, California and  Pennsylvania—the same kinds of people I could have conceivably met back home in the states.

Here is the dilemma that one faces when using an app like GetYourGuide to try to “live like a local:” the main users of these apps are also visitors searching for an authentic experience in the midst of all the touristy noise. 

Does that make the experience authentic? Or does it mean it’s rehearsed? Better yet, if you’re just going to be among only tourists jockeying for the most real experience, how different is that from paying 40 euros to summit the Eiffel Tower? 

Even if many GetYourGuide experiences can reasonably feel like a tourist mockery, that doesn’t make them bad. Moreover, it suggests a sort of fatigue among vacationers, a desire to do something different than everyone else. 

Ultimately, the demand for experiences that indulge in local life and serve as bragging rights for friends back home may question the very act of vacationing and casual travel as we know it.