(Bloomberg) — Flamingos aren’t native to Aruba, but that doesn’t stop throngs of tourists from flocking to the island every year to pose with them. Privately owned Flamingo Beach is artificially populated by the pink birds, and the only ways to get in are to stay at the Renaissance Wind Creek Resort or get one of the few $125 day passes, which sell out almost as quickly as Bad Bunny show tickets.
Travel blogger Shalyn Vukich went to Aruba in November 2020 specifically to get that iconic flamingo photo — she even packed an ocean blue swimsuit to match the famous turquoise waters. Similarly, Connie Cardy, a network marketing professional from Suffolk, UK, packed matching pink outfits for herself and her daughters ahead of her own influencer-inspired trip in October 2025.
“A flamingo pecked me several times,” says Vukich. It looked like “a zoo, or maybe even worse”, he says. Cardy described the place as crowded and chaotic. (A resort representative says the environment is kept safe and respectful for both animals and humans under guidance from local veterinarians.)
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Aruba is far from the only place where tourists seek out photo opportunities, turning some of the world’s greatest postcards into social media backdrops. “You see it everywhere,” says Leigh Barnes, president of the Americas at Intrepid Travel. “People rush past places, tick off the list and miss the real stories.”
This behavior is almost as old as tourism itself, argues Daniel Herszberg, a doctoral candidate in socio-legal studies at the University of Oxford with a focus on tourism. Since the early days of leisure travel in the 19th century, when the Grand Tour gained popularity, cruise ship posters have advertised destinations alongside their famous landmarks. This continued with the first aviation advertisements in the 1950s: go to London to see Big Ben, for example, or to India to see the Taj Mahal. “This is how travel has been sold for years,” says Herszberg. “Just the highlights.”
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This trend is exacerbated not only by social media and tourism industry offers, but also by limited vacation time. Katy Rockett, regional director for North America at operator Explore Worldwide, says the travelers most likely to plan around checklists are Americans, for whom paid time off is a scarce resource. It makes sense, she says, that they try to fit in as much as possible. Rockett sees itineraries built around quick photos gaining popularity, whether in Paris or Bali, even as awareness of overcrowding and ‘overtourism’ grows.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting that magical photo of the Eiffel Tower,” says Herszberg. However, when the entire focus of travel comes down to crossing a place off the list by taking a social media-ready photo, the experience becomes “much less about the very things that drive so many people to travel in the first place: curiosity and exploration,” he says.
Tension points
On a certain scale, this type of photo-driven tourism can be detrimental to destinations. There are crowds of balloon tourists in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, who, dissatisfied with the images taken from above, invade local farms and trample sensitive volcanic rocks to take selfies of the landscape in the so-called lovers’ rock. Heavy pedestrian traffic is causing nearby monuments to crack and shift. (Cappadocia’s regional tourism authority responded in August 2025 with stricter rules for the area, including restricting ATV and horseback riding there.) Many small businesses on the Greek island of Santorini report being stymied by queues of visitors waiting to take sunset photos from a single white-domed spot. In Iceland, after Justin Bieber showed off the Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon in one of his music videos in 2015, tourism to the site increased by about 80% over the next three years, and the ecosystem was so damaged by selfie hunters that Iceland had to close the area in 2019 until it built suitable trails and viewpoints. It has since reopened.
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“A large volume of people moving quickly through a space erodes landscapes and historic sites. Trash increases and puts pressure on infrastructure beyond sustainable limits,” says Lisa Chen, CEO of ToursByLocals, a platform that evaluates and sells tours led by independent guides.
I saw the difference between checklist tourism and a deeper experience. On a trip to Petra, Jordan, in April 2025, my guide, Mohammad Ayasrah, told me that most of his clients cannot conceive of leaving without a specific photo, taken from a peripheral point overlooking the Treasury from about 300 meters high. Didn’t I want to do the same?
Considering the stunning photos flooding my social media feed—many featuring women in long, flowing dresses on Bedouin rugs—I told Ayasrah that I would love a photo from the mountain’s edge, but without the costume change. He offered a shortcut: Why not skip the two-hour hike and pay a Bedouin $10 to facilitate an alternate route?
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“Some people come here just for the photos,” he said.
Tudor Morgan, expedition leader for adventure cruise company HX Expeditions, has witnessed this in the most remote corners of the Earth. “Some travelers see Antarctica as the ultimate item to check off the list,” he says. In their experience, some choose HX specifically for the company’s focus on education and science, while others tend to skip lectures with scientists, climatologists or wildlife experts that are part of the cruise’s standard offering. Instead, says Morgan, they prioritize the perfect selfie in front of an iceberg or a colony of penguins.
In search of solutions
Governments are also thinking about how to encourage travelers to be more respectful of their most treasured places. In recent years, they have tried to curb checklist tourism in places ranging from sacred beaches in Hawaii to Machu Picchu in Peru. Egypt’s tourism economy was at an all-time high in April 2025, when the government revamped the visitor experience at the Great Pyramids of Giza. The environment at the pyramids had become chaotic, and, to respond to concerns about sustainability and animal cruelty, the government raised entry prices for international visitors by up to 50%, created a larger visitor center, banned private vehicles and replaced them with electric buses, and banned most street vendors.
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Museums also did the same. These institutions have been dealing with the double-edged sword of social media for years and, therefore, have become incubators of solutions. When Cecilie Hollberg took over as director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, in Florence, Italy, in 2020, she wanted to delve deeper into the way visitors relate to the most famous of works: Michelangelo’s David. (More than 3 million people now visit the museum annually, most in search of the famous sculpted nude; Hollberg has written about how shops selling pornographic David souvenirs have taken over Florence’s historic center, much to the frustration of the city’s 366,000 inhabitants.)
To encourage more of those visitors to linger after the selfie, she expanded visiting hours, limited tour groups, invited Florentines to free community events, and modernized lighting systems to highlight smaller details of the sculpture. When visitation reached a record 2 million people in 2023, she says the crowds actually seemed lighter, and more people could be seen properly appreciating the art.
For Bevin Savage Yamazaki, who works on cultural and museum projects at the design firm Gensler, the changes to the Galleria were noticeable on her last family trip in 2025. (Neither she nor Gensler worked on the Galleria improvements.) “Timed entry, clearer circulation paths, and more intentional interpretation have created a noticeably calmer pace in the galleries,” says Savage Yamazaki. “Instead of being swept up in a dense crowd, we were able to slow down together, really take in the room, the light, the proportions, before arriving at the sculpture itself.”
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The difference compared to previous visits was stark. “The emotional impact returns,” she says. “You feel less like someone consuming an icon and more like someone in conversation with a masterpiece.”
This same logic explains why the Mona Lisa will have her own room at the Louvre by 2031. French President Emmanuel Macron said, in January 2025, that the move would help manage the increase in visitation and tackle overcrowding, felt especially in front of Da Vinci’s masterpiece. Visitors often report waiting for hours to barely spend a minute admiring the painting, because of the pushing and shoving and the density of the crowd.
The point is that, when this new room opens, you will have to pay extra for the privilege of looking into the eyes of the Mona Lisa and contemplating her mysteries. Or, quite possibly, for the privilege of taking a selfie with her.
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