Opinion: The Algorithm Is Not a Travel Agent

We let a screenshot become a destination

Here is a number that should give you pause: set-jetting (planning trips around places you saw on TV and in movies) is now projected to be a potential $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone, and 81% of Gen Z and millennial travelers say they plan vacations around screen locations. More than half of all global travelers report increased interest in screen-inspired getaways. The discovery funnel is fully captured: a sweeping establishing shot, a TikTok, a screenshot, and three months later you're standing in the exact frame, phone raised, recreating an image that was already an image.

There's nothing wrong with a show sending you somewhere. That's been happening since people booked Tuscany after watching a film about it. The problem is the degree, and the direction the causality now runs. We're not using screens as one input among many. We're outsourcing the entire act of wanting to an algorithm, and that's quietly making travel worse.

The flattening problem

When everyone discovers places the same way, everyone goes to the same places. The algorithm doesn't surface a thousand interesting corners; it surfaces the handful that perform, then amplifies them until they buckle. This is the engine behind the overtourism crisis. Europe took in nearly 340 million international tourists in the first half of 2025 alone, and its most beloved cities (Barcelona, Venice, Lisbon) have spent the last couple of years actively fighting back against the crowds, raising rents, hollowing out neighborhoods, pricing out the locals who made the places worth filming in the first place.

Set-jetting concentrates that pressure with brutal efficiency. A single popular series can turn a quiet town into a queue overnight. The people there didn't sign up to be a backdrop. And the traveler, having traveled thousands of miles, ends up consuming a place exactly the way they consumed it at home: through a rectangle, looking for the shot, never quite arriving.

What you actually lose

The deeper cost is to the traveler. When you go somewhere to recreate an image you've already seen, you've pre-decided what the trip means before it happens. There's no room for the place to surprise you, because you arrived with the conclusion. The whole point of going somewhere (the disorientation, the accident, the meal you stumbled into, the wrong turn that became the best afternoon) gets engineered out. You can't be surprised by a place you've already watched.

And the irony is that this generation knows better. The same research that shows 81% set-jetting also shows that 79% of young travelers want to seek out local workshops and activities specific to where they are, that experience now beats luxury, that people crave the texture of a place. The appetite for the real thing is there. It's just being constantly hijacked by the easier dopamine of the recognizable.

How to take it back

This isn't a call to delete the apps or travel like a monk. It's a call for proportion. A few principles.

Let the screen be a doorway, not a destination. If a show sends you to a city, great. Go, find the location, take the photo, and then keep walking until you're somewhere the algorithm didn't send you. The good trip starts where the screenshot ends.

Build a trip around something other than an image. A meal, a market, a hike, a record shop, a person you want to see. The 2026 trend reports are full of evidence that the most satisfying trips center on a single real experience rather than a checklist of recognizable backdrops.

Go where the camera isn't pointing. The hidden Greek islands, the unsexy transit-hub base camps, the neighborhood one block off the famous street. These consistently deliver more than the spot with the queue, precisely because they haven't been pre-chewed for you.

And put the phone down for an hour a day. Not as a wellness flex, but as a practical matter. You cannot notice anything while you're framing it.

The bottom line

The algorithm is extraordinary at telling you where everyone else is going. It is terrible at telling you where you should go, because it doesn't know you and it isn't trying to. Set-jetting isn't evil; it's just lazy, and laziness at scale is what's breaking the best places on earth. The most radical, most rewarding thing you can do as a traveler in 2026 is the oldest thing: go somewhere because you're curious, not because you recognized it. Let the trip be unwatched. That's the part worth keeping.