Travel Writing, Places to Go Lists, and the Skew To the Global North

Last April I wrote about the problem of travel writing overrepresenting Europe and the US and how that impacts how we see the world. The annual top places to visit lists are a solid compilation of, for lack of a better word, mainstream travel writing. As such, it’s a great pile of data to see if the biases I’ve seen before still hold true. And by and large, those travel lists, and the massive aggregate list I compiles, show some bias towards Europe, but the main bias is towards the Global North – aka wealthy developed countries. The global north, according to most lists, consists of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Japan.

To analyze the data, I broke down the world into eight regions: the US, North/Central America, South America, Europe, Middle East/North Africa, Asia and Oceania. Oceania is comprised of Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Islands, which is generally the easiest way to classify that region, at least that I’ve seen. I also pulled the US out of the rest of the North American continent because as all of the travel lists come from US publishers for a largely American audience, they will naturally overrepresent the US.

Here is the overall breakdown:

As you can see, the majority of places listed are in the Global North. The total numbers are 106 to 83, once you include Canada, Japan, and the Asian part of Russia in the Global North. This doesn’t seem that bad, but context is crucial. The Global North is roughly two and a half continents, including the two smallest ones while the Global South is three and a half continents, including the two largest ones, and contains a little over 80 percent of the world’s population. The Global South is much, much larger than the Global North, meaning the skew is actually even larger than what the raw numbers show, which is already pretty big. 

The thing that surprised me the most was that the lists each had roughly the same number of places listed for South America, the Middle East/North Africa (MENA), and Sub-Saharan Africa regardless of how long the list was. There were some exceptions of course – Travel and Leisure had six places for MENA, and CNN had only one for South America – but the five lists generally had 2-4 entries for each region.

This is in contrast to Europe, which had anywhere from five to 16 entries, depending on the length of the list. In fact, the percentage of places in Europe was remarkably consistent, usually around 26 percent. The piece with the highest percentage in Europe - with 31 percent – was the New York Times, which is also the longest one. To me, this suggests that the travel writers found a couple places in each of the less popular regions, and then, if necessary, padded out their lists with places from Europe and the US, although that depends on the travel writers.

Furthermore, the bias towards certain areas cannot be blamed the cost of flying there, which is often a shorthand for accessibility. From DC, where I live, it is cheaper to fly to Cape Town, South Africa, or even Tashkent, Uzbekistan, than it is to fly to Sydney, Australia (for simplicity’s sake I checked flights to all three places for the exact same dates). And yet, at least for the 2019 lists, Oceania generally does as well, if not better than the three regions I mentioned earlier. Oceania, for the record, has a spread of 1-4 listings, depending on the list.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s really hard not to fall into this trap. For my top 12 places to go in 2019 list I consciously tried to make it a balanced list and I still ended up with Europe getting more listings than any other region. And my personal Places to Go list is roughly one third Europe, although that is largely because my list is, with some exceptions, broken up by country and Europe has a ton of little countries. As the Places to Go lists generally have more specific locations than mine – the New York Times has multiple entries for Germany, for example – I don’t think their skew can be explained the same way as mine.

So what is the point of looking at this, beyond the fact that I enjoy making charts? First, these data show that this problem is in fact real and somewhat widespread, not just a perception on my part. Certain areas really are being ignored by travel writers in favor of others. I went into why this is a problem at length in my previous piece, but to summarize, biases in travel writing both reflect and reinforce our biases towards different parts of the world, to the detriment of everyone, including ourselves.

One counter is that travel writing is a commercial endeavor. The writers and travel organizations aren’t just trying to recommend places, but also make money. As such, they have to cater to the interests of their readers, the consumers. But I don’t think this argument gives the consumers, people who read about travel, enough credit. I only have anecdotal evidence of course, but I’ve found that people read about travel partially because they want to learn about places they don’t know – the unfamiliar, the new and exciting. It’s about opening your eyes to something you didn’t even know existed, in addition to the excitement of things that you’ve long wanted to see. I’ve wanted to go to see the moai on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for ages, but am also excited to see thousand-year-old ruins in southern Colombia and had no idea they even existed until last year.

Places to Go This Year lists are by definition about opening people’s eyes to places they otherwise wouldn’t think to visit. It’s about new, up and coming places – the writers explicitly say and look for this. Therefore, they have even less of an excuse than other travel writing to focus on the better-known regions and ignore the lesser-known ones. If anything, lists designed to discuss emerging places to travel ought to be skewed towards the Global South, as there are more emerging travel opportunities, and undiscovered things to see there than in largely well-trod areas.  

None of this is meant to suggest that there aren’t amazing, and totally worthwhile things to see all over the Global North - there is tons to see there. But the world is so much bigger than that. There are so many amazing things to see everywhere, and hundreds of cultures. There are new ideas, foods, and admittedly challenges (travel isn’t all sunshine and bunnies) everywhere, not just the places we’ve already heard of. Travel writing already opens up the world to people, helping us find new places to explore. Imagine how much better it will be when it breaks out of its current limitations and truly reflects the entire world.