Travel writers and readers: Why do people get so angry about travel articles?

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This was published 6 years ago

Travel writers and readers: Why do people get so angry about travel articles?

By Ben Groundwater
Updated
This is the internet: there's nowhere that's abuse-free .

This is the internet: there's nowhere that's abuse-free .Credit: iStock

You would think travel would be a safe space. You would think you could express an opinion about the world and your experience with it and everyone would take it as just that – an opinion. Something you could agree with or put forward something different.

People wouldn't treat you like Yassmin Abdel-Magied. They wouldn't abuse you. They wouldn't threaten you with violence. They wouldn't hope for you to be unemployed and never find work again.

But then, this is the internet. There are no safe spaces. There is nowhere that's abuse-free.

That's something I had to come to terms with a long time ago, but it still surprises me when I read other travel writers' work on the internet, stories that I find interesting, or funny, or provocative, and scroll down to the comments and… Whoa. So much aggression, so many sense-of-humour fails, so much self-righteousness. What's everyone got to be so upset about?

Travel is funny like that. It should be something to be celebrated and enjoyed, to be taken light-heartedly in the same way you would a good holiday, but in reality it stirs people's passions deeply. Insulting a destination someone loves is like insulting their family. Disparaging an experience someone else has enjoyed is like slapping them in the face.

I've experienced this aggression for years, as the writer of an online column. I've been told by a reader to "f--- off to Afghanistan". Another once expressed the wish that I die in a fire. Someone else said I wasn't fit to write jokes on Christmas crackers. It's also been suggested, on numerous occasions, that I've never left the safety of my lounge room.

In the grand realm of insanely exaggerated online abuse, it's not that bad. I'm nowhere near the sphere of someone like Fairfax Media columnist Clementine Ford, who's forced to weather a horrific storm of abuse for even the most benign opinion piece. But I – and plenty of other travel writers – am still treated to a fairly remarkable amount of hatred for someone who writes about going on holidays.

What's everyone so angry about? Why are they so quick to become upset about travel?

One of the problems, I think, is that people seem to confuse their own personal experience with a destination as the "truth". They got robbed there – therefore, it's a dangerous place. They found plenty of restaurants with English menus – therefore, there are plenty of restaurants with English menus. They had a great experience with a local person – therefore, local people there are friendly.

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If anyone writes something that disagrees with that personal truth, they're quick to anger. You're wrong. You're an idiot. I've been there and it's different.

Some readers also seem to confuse travel writers' observations with similar claims of fact. But there's an unwritten caveat that they're missing in my work and that of many other writers: we can only report from our own experience, in the same way as any other traveller would. We can use statistics or facts to back up an opinion, but so much of the travel experience is subjective, left up to observation and interpretation – I wouldn't for a second claim that the things I've seen or the way I've felt are somehow an inalienable truth.

Your experience of a country is not everyone's experience of a country. It's just a personal version of the truth. And everyone's is different.

Here's an example. I travelled to Rio de Janeiro a few years ago and had an amazing time there – I never felt unsafe, I met amazing people, and I thoroughly enjoyed being in the city for the first time. I would recommend it to anyone. Don't listen to the horror stories, just go and enjoy yourself.

On my last day in Rio, however, I met a fellow backpacker down at Copacabana and got chatting to him. It turned out his experience of Rio couldn't have been more different to mine. He'd been mugged three times in three days. By the last mugging, at gunpoint, he had nothing left to give up. It sounded horrendous. He couldn't wait to get out of there.

So whose experience of Rio was the truth? I would tell people they should definitely go. He would tell people they definitely shouldn't. Who's right?

There's no correct answer. We're both right, and we're both wrong. But it does go some way to explaining why you'll sometimes read someone's opinion of a destination and think to yourself, "What? Have they even left their couch?"

Plenty of people do understand that. It's only a very small minority that then jumps on email and expresses their wish that the writer of a travel story die in a fire – or just tells them condescendingly that they'll "get it" eventually. But still, those people exist in the travel sphere, and it's a constant surprise to me.

The internet is an angry place. But surely we can treat travel as an exception.

Do you find people get surprisingly angry about travel stories? Is it worth all the rage? Or do people need to calm down a bit?

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