TRAVEL recently became the world’s biggest industry according to World Trade Organisation. Statistics claim that millennials would rather save for travel than anything else, and Instagram has created a certain wanderlust that influences decisions about how they spend their money. The instagrammability of a destination is now the number one motivation among millennials for booking a holiday, creating an important discussion of expectation and reality.

Nowadays, how do you choose your travel destinations?

This week, Instagram unveiled a new action button with the ability to reserve, get tickets, start order or book — making it easier for its 800 million users to book tickets and holidays through the app. Business profiles will be able to use this action button on their profile pages, taking users one tap away from a booking page without ever leaving the platform.

The travel industry is quick to tell us where to go but not how and why. In the quest for a fresh method of travelling rather than merely a destination’s instagrammability, I have been reading a few books on the topic. Here are a few of my favourite thoughts on the subject…

Regardless of how wonderful it can be to travel, delays, queues, and crowds will inevitably come along with the experience, filling our hearts with disappointment while our minds are filled with so many perfect pictures seen on Instagram. There are sides to travelling that are not photographed which can bring us disappointment, but it’s a personal task to find the joy, even if the journey is not always as perfect as the photos of others show. As the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once said, give me five minutes of a man’s life over all the books in the world. That is, remember why you are travelling in the first place — to experience what it’s like to live another life.

And from The Art Of Travel by Swiss-born British author Alain de Botton:

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.”

And one final thought from de Botton,”The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

Always travelling with an open mind will help ensure that your visit to another place will closer match your expectations, and even more so if your choice was based on something deeper than a place’s instagramability.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

Follow us on Instagram @thisisglamorous

[instagram-feed]