Prelims

Half Title Page

Locating the Influencer

Endorsement Page

In Locating the Influencer, Christian S. Ritter offers an original account of the contemporary travel influencer. This compelling book critically examines how travel influencers monetize their journeys in a world marked by uncertainties, especially those related to the climate crisis.

Professor Mette Mortensen, University of Copenhagen

Title Page

Locating the Influencer: Place and Platform in Global Tourism

BY

CHRISTIAN S. RITTER

Karlstad University, Sweden

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2025

Copyright © 2025 Christian S. Ritter.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80262-598-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-597-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80262-599-8 (Epub)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

List of Abbreviations

About the Author

Christian S. Ritter is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University. He is a co-chair of the working group on Migration and Mobility of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF).

Why Study Travel Influencers? – Foreword

Paolo S. H. Favero

It is highly unlikely for anyone these days to open up social media without being sucked into a triumphant cavalcade of spectacular images depicting amazing places scattered all over our beautiful planet. Scrolling down on my feed the day in which I started writing this text I was met by the mesmerising mirror images created by the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia; by endless green forests in Bali photographed from a high point of view; by beaches drenched in the orange sunset light somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean. Coming from places so different and far from each other, all these pictures have nevertheless always something in common: the presence of an influencer behind, on the side of or, most often, right in front of the camera. A hand holding a cocktail glass at the sunset beach; a pair of legs covered by a yellow dress on a ‘Balinese’ swing; the full body of a smiling young woman or man standing on the line dividing the sky and its mirrored images on the thin layer of water on top of the salt flat. And then the likes and comments (in voice or text, embedded in the images themselves or in the conversations that follow) that draw the boundaries around the ‘communitas’ (Turner, 1974), that is the temporary community in transition, that surrounds the influencer in question. For the travel influencer, every image is, to use Sontag’s (1977) vocabulary, more a matter of ‘witness’ than of ‘record’. An image is always an interpretation of reality rather than ‘a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality’ (p. 26). This interpretation always obviously requires the presence of an interpreter, the influencer, the figure who mediates these experiences by inscribing them in broader narratives of freedom, discovery, trauma, success, etc.

Travel influencers are today key traversal figures, hence their relevance as objects of study. Around them we witness the emergence of not only new forms of livelihood and new narrative encroachments but also the reaffirmation of travel’s centrality in the affairs of the rich and privileged of this world (as well as for those who provide them with services). We tend to look at travel influencers with the eyes of novelty, yet, they carry on the legacy of many precursors, and among them easily identifiable are the Grand Tour travellers, the hippies and the yuppies. With the former, travel influencers share the desire to become experts (and guides) not in and on places and cultures but rather in and on travel itself. There is a blind desire for discovering beautiful vistas fully endorsing the privileges that travelling entails, seemingly unbothered by the racial, ethnic and class gaps that make these explorations possible. These aspects seldom fit in their accounts. And in common with the hippies they share an unlimited love for freedom, one however commonly centred on the individual rather than on the community surrounding it. And this individual-centrism guides us to identify yet another category of people that somehow seems to exercise influence on the travel influencer. These are the yuppies of the 1990s with their endless celebration of the value of monetary success. Uniting these different ambitions and tendencies and giving them a new (digitally based and often very diversified) façade, travel influencers appear, regardless of whether we like the qualities they represent or not, to be an important phenomenon, key to the doings of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Hence, it is absolutely worthy of attention by the social sciences. Travel influencers do not simply exemplify evolving online forms of communication and labour. They also importantly point us in the direction of the changing ways in which neoliberal capitalist societies envision subjects, communities and cultural diversity. The escape from what the author of this book calls ‘the overcodifications and striations of Fordistic workplaces’ (Ritter, 2024a, p. 46) is much more than a matter of pure labour but also one of social stratification, of new possibilities for imagining the meaning of the individual, family and community. Travel influencers seem to signal (while beautifying it) the triumph of the process of individualisation that is central to the project of neoliberalism capitalism. Yet what more can we learn from them?

Offering a detailed unpacking of the (symbolic and material) economy of travel influencers, this book is definitely a stepping stone for the study of this ever-evolving and diverse world. This study beautifully details a platform for the study of these individuals and the temporary communities they surround themselves with. Of particular value is the use that it makes of a combination of established qualitative methods (such as participant observation and interviews) with different types of quantitative methods (network data analysis) for identifying the online journey and dissemination of specific contents. So besides laying forth the fundaments for what looks like a promising series of new research engagements in the field of travel influencers, this book can also offer methodological inspiration for those scholars exploring phenomena at the intersection of online and offline worlds.

Paolo S. H. Favero

Acknowledgements

My first and foremost thanks go to all the interlocutors I met during my travels and in the researched tourism destinations. This monograph would not have been possible without them, and I owe them my greatest debt. In particular, I am indebted to the mobile community of travel influencers that I could – with interruptions – follow during their journeys and video-making sessions. The ethnographic research project on which this book is based entailed multiple roller coaster moments. Beginning with the joys of travelling and my filmmaking attempts, the research was disrupted by pandemic lockdowns and the standstill of international air traffic in the first part of 2020. I’m deeply grateful to all research participants for their time and in many cases friendship as they emphatically shared their experiences of both travelling and video-making. They opened their life-worlds, hotel rooms and sometimes suitcases for me. Furthermore, I am very thankful to many tourism professionals, including hotel staff, tourist office employees and event organisers in Angkor Wat, Chiang Mai, Riga, Singapore, Stockholm, Tallinn and Vilnius. I hope the research collaborators feel that sharing their expertise helps tourism professionals worldwide.

I would also like to express my gratitude to several scholars who have discussed tourism research issues with me and helped me refine theoretical perspectives. The various chapters of the book are inspired by priceless comments from Pablo Abend, Georgia Aitaki, Alexandre Diallo, Arthur Mason, Henrik Örnebring and Jolynna Sinanan. I also wish to acknowledge the support of Emerald’s editorial team. Jen McCall encouraged me to submit a book proposal from the very start of our conversations, and Lydia Cutmore guided me through the final stages of the project. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers.

This monograph is the main outcome of a postdoctoral research project at the Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT), Tallinn University. I would like to thank the administrative and academic staff at Tallinn University for their continued support throughout the project. The Estonian Research Council initially funded the project through a Mobilitas Pluss grant (grant MOBJD68; 2018-2020). The writing-up phase of the project was supported by a team grant awarded by the Estonian Research Council (PRG1191; 2021). Finally, I’m also thankful to the board of the Centre for Geomedia Studies, Karlstad University, for awarding me a career grant in autumn 2023, which allowed me to put the final touches to the book.