Posts about luxury vacations on social media can inspire jealousy; how can you travel without breaking the bank?

In February 2019, I returned to Houston to drive my mother and grandmother eight hours to Pine Bluff, Arkansas for the funeral of my oldest aunt. This was the second of my grandmother’s twelve children to die, a grim experience for any parent. After years of poor health, she had not expected to outlive any of her children.

I booked a two-room suite for $259 a night at a Residence Inn in downtown Little Rock, a 40-minute drive away. My grandmother was impressed by the size of the bathtub. We talked about my grandmother’s upbringing in rural northern Louisiana, and she told me things I’d never heard about her and her life. She was thrilled at the chance to talk about her difficult childhood. We mourned with family and friends in their bleak hometown of Pine Bluff, which was repeatedly voted America’s worst place to live when I was growing up. On the drive home, we bought my grandmother a three-meat barbecue combo from one of her favorite places in town. She ate it all before we even crossed the Texas state line, then fell asleep as I drove the rest of the way in darkness and silence.

When we finally got back to Houston, she thanked me as we hugged. “I’ve never been on vacation,” she said.

At first I felt bad that a funeral weekend in a two-and-a-half-star hotel was the first and only “vacation” she had ever had. But what is also true is that she appreciated the low-budget trip, because at 92 she had no idea what anyone else was doing. I, on the other hand, am in a group conversation with two people with lots of disposable income and worn-out passports.

It was the Fourth of July when Spencer Hall threw a photo of himself with a giant eagle on his right arm into our small group chat of college-football-loving friends. “Good morning,” he said.

I knew immediately where he was: we’d been talking earlier about our fascination with Mongolia: its vastness, remoteness, and desolation that make it the world’s least populated country; its status as home to one of the world’s last remaining nomadic cultures; the history of Genghis Khan and his ruthless campaign to rule the region. And, of course, the country’s reverence for the golden eagle, which I’d ​​first encountered in a textbook. I’d never forgotten the photo of one of those large eagles on a falconer’s glove: it looked so majestic, so cool… so alien. And now, nearly 25 years later, my friend had recreated that photo in an improbable way.

It was no surprise that the endearingly idiosyncratic Hall, who runs the Channel 6 website with his partner Holly Anderson and co-hosts the college football podcast Close Fullcasthad followed his wanderlust to Mongolia. He had already traveled extensively through Asia and was looking for a reason to go back, but to a place he had never seen before.

“It’s very, very different, and it’s about as far away as you can get,” Spencer said. “And most importantly, it’s supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be Outdoorsman’s Paradise, but in Central Asia.”

Bomani Jones, the other member of our group chat, was leaving for a two-week trip to Spain a few days later. But he used a very different calculus when choosing his destination: “I want to feel as comfortable on the road as I do at home.”

Jones, the host of The Right Time with Bomani Jonesspent most of his time in Barcelona, ​​but also crossed the border briefly to Andorra, a small tax haven sandwiched between Spain and France. He spent time on the beach and generally enjoyed five-star luxury accommodations.

I felt a pang of jealousy as my friends enjoyed their adventures. And admittedly, that was mainly because I had planned to join Jones on his trip earlier in the year. But due to a number of unexpected family commitments, including some that cost more money than expected, I was unable to go. We were both disappointed.

It was a bummer, especially at a time when I really could have used an escape from a few pretty grueling months. But I did some solace in the fact that my wife and I had managed to book a nanny for our 2-year-old son and get away for a night in June at an expensive beach hotel just 45 minutes away. We spent most of that time in our room, scarfing down a pantry full of snacks and looking out at the Pacific Ocean from our balcony. That almost felt like enough.

I realized that I was thinking about my group conversation the way others think about social media and travel influencers.

It’s hard to go on Instagram or Tik Tok without seeing an influencer—or even a well-heeled friend—posting from some impossibly beautiful destination like Greece or Iceland or the Amalfi Coast. For those of us scrolling at home, those photos can convince us that luxury travel is the only travel worth taking. Suddenly, a quick jaunt through Las Vegas or a weekend on the balmy beaches of Florida doesn’t seem enough. A night in a cozy bed and breakfast definitely isn’t enough.

“The media machine and the tourism boards have millions of dollars to give to influencers and writers and all these people to make you feel like you’re supposed to be on vacation,” says Tariro Mzezewa, an Atlanta-based travel journalist who hosts a new podcast called Highlight of travel“And if you don’t do it that way, then you feel like you’re missing out.”

At home, caught up in the humdrum of everyday life, it’s easy to forget that social media doesn’t tell the whole story of a holiday. The images we see on Instagram are often heavily curated, leaving out the more difficult aspects of travel.

“People don’t want to see something happen like, ‘My wallet got stolen,’ or ‘I got food poisoning,’” said Victoria Walker, a Washington, D.C.-based reporter who writes a travel newsletter called Get on.

Jones, however, sees value in showing his friends and followers a slice of the good life. Before signing a lucrative four-year deal with ESPN in 2013, Jones said that the footage introduced him to parts of the world he had never considered before.

“I think what social media has done with travel is it has demystified the idea of ​​travel. I think it shows people that this kind of travel is more accessible than they realized,” Jones said.

But whatever you think of the influence of social media, it’s clear that the emphasis on luxury getaways is causing people to overlook affordable options closer to home.

“I think the number of people who experience something like this is so small that I don’t think we should even try to have those kinds of vacations,” Mzezewa said. “I think in a lot of cases you’re better off not knowing what you don’t know. I’m just happy to be able to go somewhere and have a great time.”

Like my late grandmother, for example. (She died in 2022 at the age of 95.) She may be an extreme example, but her appreciation for the simple pleasures of getting away inspired me. It’s a much more universal experience than a cruise to Turks and Caicos.

And none of the people I spoke to grew up taking long trips. Instead, they usually got in cars or vans and went to the nicest place in the neighborhood.

“We’ve been to the Gulf Coast, yeah, we’ve been to Destin and the Fort Walton area,” said Hall, who grew up in Nashville.

“We didn’t get on a plane to go out of the country,” said Jones, who spent much of his childhood in the Houston area. “We just drove a lot to visit family.”

That was my experience, too. As a child, I enjoyed the views of the bucolic countryside on trips to visit our family in the Texas Hill Country and Arkansas. If I was lucky, my parents would treat me to dinner at the Catfish King on Highway 59 near Livingston, or a brisket fresh from the smokehouse at City Market in Luling. In Little Rock, we always made sure to visit the only TCBY frozen yogurt shops in the country.

At the time, I thought I was really lucky: I didn’t know much about what my classmates did in the summer or where they went. There wasn’t much history of travel in my family, since they grew up in a time when black people didn’t have much freedom of movement in the Jim Crow South.

That was also the case for Brandon LeBlanc, originally from New Orleans but now working as a technology lawyer in Singapore.

“That’s when I understood that traveling, especially for a black family, was something special in itself,” he said. “But at the same time, I was also very content to just stay in New Orleans and be with friends.”

I met LeBlanc in 2007 when we were young professionals living together with a mutual friend during a trip to Austin. Neither of us were making much money at the time. But over the years, I couldn’t help but notice on social media that LeBlanc always seemed to be visiting one idyllic destination after another. His Facebook posts show that he’s visited South Korea, Japan, France, and Indonesia this year.

“Money-wise, my travel has changed quite a bit over the years, and you can really divide it into two parts: before and after I moved abroad,” LeBlanc said. “After I moved to Spain in 2015, the frequency and ease of travel has increased dramatically. In general, I’m still cost-conscious, while traveling and otherwise. I never try to break the bank on a trip; I just try to get out there and see the world.”

And if you can somehow avoid travel envy—something I’m still working on—the reward is that seeing the world can look like a field trip through Mongolia, but it can also look like a road trip to the most miserable town in America. Just ask my grandmother.