Does Ethical Travel Content Creation Exist?

Between 2020 and 2024, I did not travel internationally. There were a few reasons for not leaving the country. First, the start of the pandemic locked up borders, removed me from my position with the Peace Corps, and created uncertainty about every single facet of life and society as a whole. Second, I started working seasonally for the Park Service, and then I got a permanent job. Which was great news for my bank account, but bad news for having time to travel, as I had to build up my paid time off. Finally, in 2023, my friends got married, so I visited home instead of going abroad.

2024 was the first year that finally I had enough PTO and, more importantly, enough financial stability, and I finally left the country.

I think by the time I got to Japan in 2024, the travel influencers had moved on to other countries. I had, admittedly, watched a lot of their content. Reels would show up on my For You page with “Top Neighborhoods in Tokyo” and “How to Spend a Perfect Day in Kyoto!”. They are basically bite-sized travel blogs that are so easy to consume, you can scroll through dozens before you realize, huh, is everyone really recommending the same neighborhood for thrifting in Tokyo?

But I took note of what I liked in the videos, wrote down suggestions, and used the content to figure out where I might want to visit.

So, I’m not writing this to rag on travel content creators.

Really, I’m not. I like their content! It’s easy to watch. Fun to watch, too. Some travel content creators are doing really cool things, like Omar Nok, who had travelled from Egypt to Japan on foot and is now going around the world without using planes. Travel content creators like Omar show a lot of the realities of traveling. For example, he has documented visa challenges, border crossings, and how in the end, we generally get by with the help of strangers.

Other travel bloggers highlight how fun it is to travel solo, and I am so down for that content. Because maybe people in my life will watch it and stop asking me why I like to travel alone so much. In a way, this type of content can open people’s eyes to the possibilities of different types of travel, and that they, too, can do it.

And I get the appeal of wanting to document your travels. I take photos all the time of where I am and what I’m doing and what I’m seeing. I like to post it on my social media not just so I can get likes, which of course is a dopamine boost, but so in a year or so from now, when I scroll through my feed, I can revisit my travels.

And I get that it makes money. Travel content creation is popular. People can build careers as travel influencers. Note, though, that I am avoiding the word influencer in this essay. Influencing is a particular form of money-making in which a creator works with a brand in a paid partnership. There are travel content creators who are sponsored. If they are, they do have to explicitly state it in their video, especially if the video is an ad. Some content creators exchange their content for things like food and lodging. A new form of the barter economy, if you will.

Travel content creators continue to make content so that they can, one, make money, which helps them, two, continue to travel and make money, and three, in their own way, they are documenting their experiences for themselves.

My question is, how ethical is it?

Maybe this is a weird question on its own. It’s a job, right? How ethical are a lot of our jobs?

I came to think about this when I was travelling in Chiang Mai. I had noticed it a bit in Bangkok, but because that city is so big, running into travel content creators didn’t happen as often. But in Chiang Mai, it was like they were everywhere. I felt like I was dodging selfie sticks more than motorbikes. It was also Yi Peng and Loy Krathong, and I was in the Old City, which explains why I was seeing so many of them.

Yi Peng is a Lanna festival of lights where lanterns are lit and released to the sky. It occurs at the same time as Loy Krathong, a festival where ritual, decorated floating vessels (krathongs) are released into rivers to thank Goddess Khongkha, the goddess of water and river. So these are very picturesque festivals. Lanterns floating in the sky and in the river? Sounds like good content to me, and I was just thinking about my Instagram grid. Imagine  if you were someone who made money off of clicks on social media. You can see why Chiang Mai was packed.

I was eating at Forest Fern Café, which is a super cute, indoor-outdoor café with lots of trees and a garden-like atmosphere, when a selfie camera appeared. These little cameras are the travel content creators’ technology of choice. They are compact, easy to use, and take great quality videos. Generally a creator will have a separate mic, and it was not rare to see people talking into their neck or holding their fist up to their face.

I was mid-bite of a sandwich when that camera was aimed at me. Chewing, which I do not do particularly gracefully, I stared the camera down. The creator moved it before I finished swallowing. As I took another incredibly graceful bite, I wondered, should I say something? Like, tell her to blur my face? I would’ve appreciated a heads-up that she was filming because there were bits of lettuce coming out of my mouth. I decided to keep eating and leave her alone. Maybe she wouldn’t even use this footage because I ruined it with my inability to eat daintily.

And then another selfie camera appeared, and this creator captured everyone eating in a panorama.

Okay, I thought, that’s annoying, but I guess I am in a public space, and so, I have to expect I could be photographed and filmed.

But couldn’t they have asked?!

That thought followed me for a few days after this meal, as I kept getting in people’s photos and videos, and thinking to myself, how many “HOW TO SPEND A PERFECT THREE DAYS IN CHIANG MAI” videos am I going to end up in?

Then I met some people at a cooking class in Laos; one of them was filming content for a YouTube channel and social media she was starting, and the other two were documenting for their friends and family. I asked if I could follow both of them. Mostly because my trip was ending soon, and I loved that they were going to keep travelling, and I wanted to live vicariously through these cool people.

I was talking with another cooking classmate who came with one of the content creators, and he had said, yeah, she asked me how I feel about filming, and I told her it was cool.

She had asked me too, though after I was in the shot, and to be honest, I didn’t mind since I was asked.

Later that night, after we all went our separate ways, now novices in Lao cooking, I couldn’t stop thinking about the concept of consent in travel content creation. I don’t remember the other people in the class being asked if they could be filmed. I don’t remember the teacher, Sit, being asked either. Maybe they were, and I missed it, or maybe the idea is to blur faces. But what if a travel content creator just asked? “Hey, I’m filming for a channel, is it cool if I film our class, or is there anyone uncomfortable with that, and I can blur your face?”

In some ways, existing in public these days is like being in the Panopticon. We have become the new surveillance. By stepping outside, you are likely going to end up in someone’s photo, video, or livestream. You may even end up being ridiculed online and never know it. People get filmed all the time for things that used to just be a passing thought of “huh, that’s weird.” One example that came up recently on my For You page was a creator in Bangkok who filmed a white tourist who was shirtless on the metro system. Yes, tourists in Bangkok should wear shirts. Everyone should know the cultural norms of a place they are visiting and follow them accordingly. And people should generally, if they are in a city, wear a shirt. But instead of having a conversation, the rule of thumb these days is to film and make content, rage-bait people into likes and comments, all while that tourist is walking through the BTS completely unaware that he is the subject of a viral video.

Imagine scrolling through Instagram or TikTok and seeing yourself in a video with thousands of views and comments.

Even Foucault wouldn’t have guessed that the real surveillance state would turn out to be everyday people and their TikTok accounts.

Consent is something I think a lot about as an anthropologist. As a discipline, anthropology has a rough past in which people’s images and knowledge were exploited in ethnographies, ethnographic photographs, and ethnographic film, without compensation or, a lot of the time, even consent. That is why ethical fieldwork is taught, and then hammered into anthropology students. That is why universities have Institutional Review Boards. That is why every project I do, I have consent forms.

Prior and informed consent is a concept you’ll hear about in terms of social science research. What it means is that the participants know what the project is, know of any risks that may be undertaken by participating, know what the goal of the research is, and what the final product might turn out to be. Prior and informed consent can be withdrawn at any time. The anthropologist has to structure projects in a way that minimizes harm, which we generally do by agreeing to participants’ anonymity, allowing them to review transcripts of interviews and tell us what they do not want included, and providing a draft copy of the final report or other product for participant review. We also say that, in the context of interviews, a participant does not have to answer every question. They can always say skip or not answer, and we’ll move on.

The best practice currently is to pay people for their time and knowledge. Because anthropologists are being paid to conduct the research, participants should be compensated in some manner.

Ethics are constantly evolving, especially in anthropology, and one area that has been gaining traction within Indigenous nations is data sovereignty. As in, a nation has the power to decide where their knowledge, their data, goes. Where it is stored. How, and who, can access it. What sharing with others might appropriately look like. This is a realm of knowledge management that has created more just projects and partnerships within social science research.

But does a travel content creator really have to think about ethics?

As a tourist, and someone who takes photos for my own use and not for monetary gain, I think a lot about the subject in my photos. I avoid people’s faces if I did not ask them for a picture. I like landscape photos, street scenes, city blocks. Pictures of museum exhibitions, restaurants, the food on my plate. If I have people in it, I take photos so you wouldn’t be able to recognize who they are: back of heads, shadows, small figures in the distance. And I never take or post photos of kids.

That is a rule I developed in my two years as Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia. I did post photos of myself with the kids from my host family because they were like my little siblings. But as time went on, I’ve just grown more uncomfortable with taking photos of kids and posting them on social media. If the kid is under high school age (so under fourteen or so), then they can’t really consent to having their image posted publicly. Even if the parent says yes, the lack of ownership a kid has over their image keeps me from posting.

I took a slow boat from Thailand to Laos with a company I learned about from a travel content creator’s YouTube video. Because I watched the video, and because the company puts this on the website, I knew we would be visiting a local village, Ban Kang Lae, which the company supports with donations. The tour guide explained that the company regularly checks in with the chief of the village to make sure the company can keep stopping there. Of course, providing regular donations probably influences that consent. During high season, the company stops at this village six times a week.

In the YouTube video I watched, the couple filmed the kids running down the hill to greet the boat, the excitement as they followed the group through the village, and some photos they took with the kids. When I first watched it, I thought, did they really have to film the kids’ faces? Like couldn’t they blur them out? Or just not film at all?

And then when I was there, our tour guide told us that we could film the kids and take photos with them, but if we saw an elder, we had to ask for permission. I thought this was very interesting. For the kids, consent didn’t matter, but it was extremely important for elders.

In the village, we saw a shaman carrying a chicken he was going to slaughter in the woods, and though the moment was incredibly cool, no one in my group wanted to take a photo.

They took photos of the kids.

One woman kept giving them chocolate and then acting like she didn’t have any after they kept asking, understandably, for more chocolate, and then she pulled out another piece of chocolate to give a toddler right before we left.

Someone commented, I think we’re the first foreigners they’ve seen, right as another private slowboat, this one two-stories tall, pulled into the dock.

The kids ran down the hill, as excited as they had been to see us, and the adults pulled out their cameras, ready to take photos.

Rinse and repeat, over six times a week.

Can you ethically create travel content? Can you ethically travel in general? It feels like this question has haunted travelers. Is travel unethical in and of itself? Can the power dynamics between local and tourist ever be breached? Does the ethics of taking a photo of someone without their permission change whether you mean to make money off of it or just to brag on your personal social media?

A travel content creator has every right to film in public space as I do to exist without being filmed. In many ways, I accept that I will show up in the background of many YouTube videos that I will never know about. Maybe I’m the star of someone’s Instagram reel, and hopefully, mercifully, I will remain oblivious and untagged. But I have every right to ask someone to not film in my direction. I have every right to see a YouTube video that may show my face. Consent to our bodies is also consent to our image.

If there were any advice I could give to a travel content creator, it would be this: learn from anthropology’s messed-up past. Create a consent form, or at least a script that you can tell people, which lets them know what you’re filming and what you want to do with that footage. Ask people if you can film them or whether they want their faces blurred. Or whether they don’t want to be in the shot at all. Let people know about your account so they can see the final product. Let people walk by you before you press record. Don’t make content off someone without their consent. Turn the camera off if someone asks.

Ask, ask, ask, and if the answer is no, then that’s okay. Rejection is just an opportunity to create in a different way.

If you can film yourself talking to the camera about how empowering it is to solo travel or how cool this restaurant in Tokyo is, you can ask for consent before using other people in your content.