It’s Sunday night in New York City and I can be found editing a travel story, per usual. As I begin to search for imagery to pair with this evening’s guide for solo traveling females, I’m struck by a disconcerting reality: all the images popping up in my search look nothing like real women travelers. I journey from Shutterstock to Unsplash to Pixabay to Getty Images to Flickr and am offered a never-ending parade of twenty-something, fair-skinned, blonde-hair, skirt twirling models in stock photography that does nothing to represent real women travelers.
I can chalk this biased view of female travelers to the stock image industry, but rather, I know it points to a much larger issue within the travel industry itself. If I search “Black female traveler,” I am served images of tribal women in Africa standing against huts. If I search “Latina traveler,” I am faced with curvaceous women—a lá Sophia Vergara—posed against a lacquered bar, wearing skin-tight dresses. If I search “older female traveler,” I am confronted with images of little old ladies donning khakis and posing on cruise ship balconies. If I search “woman at the airport,” I see a collection of women in high heels and red lipstick waiting for flights as though they’ll be strutting the runway. If I search “female traveler,” the results prove completely devoid of diversity, race, age, body type, or personality. The photos paint a picture; one that seems to say traveling is limited to the young, beautiful, and white.
These photos are a symptom of a larger problem; one that extends far beyond the stock imagery sites but is often seen in travel advertising. The issue with these images is how their portrayal grossly excludes most women today. The lack of diversity in travel advertising, for example, is a gross underrepresentation of the power of Black travelers who—according to a study from MMGY Global—spent upwards of $109.4 billion on pre-pandemic travel in 2019. When the depiction of a traveler fails to represent the actual people traveling, you create an experience that can be exclusionary to many, including the BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, plus-size, and disability communities.
Of course, tonight is not the first time I’ve been confronted by such a jarring reality of the travel industry and its portrayal of women. After all, when the majority of travel publications are founded and/or edited by men—despite women compromising more than 70 percent of the travel consumer base—it’s unsurprising that the female traveler is represented as being sexy, young, white, and thin.
The personification of “the girl who travels”—made popular a few years back by a user-uploaded video set to the soundtrack of ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’—keeps popping up in the travel industry. A girl who travels implies a young, free-spirited female who can’t be tamed by men and therefore is branded with a warning: Don’t fall in love with her. She is a manic-pixie-dream girl seen through the male gaze; a romanticized vision one falls in love with on the streets of Bangkok but ultimately lets slip through their fingers.
The flaw in this archetype is how limiting it can be, and how dangerous an impact it can have on both the industry and on aspiring travelers who fail to see themselves in these travel depictions. Travel should not be about one’s appearance, wardrobe, body type, age, skin color, or hairstyle. Rather, travel is a celebration of culture and the authenticity that exists behind it. Travel exists to bolster humanity and connect us as a people.
Thankfully, a slew of women-founded travel groups and networks are working to combat these limited representations by ushering in a more diverse and representative look of travelers today. There’s Annette Richmond and her group, Fat Girls Traveling, which promotes body positivity amongst travelers and celebrates plus-size women. There’s Evita Robinson and Nomadness, who is the founder of the largest Black and Brown travel community in the industry and is a relentless advocate for Black travelers and their representation in the travel space. There’s Beth Santos of Wanderful, whose women’s travel network not only connects travelers worldwide, but hosts a slew of virtual and in-person events that speak to important issues like race, diversity, and representation. And there’s tour companies like Olivia Travel, which organizes LGBTQ-only tours and works to connect LGBTQ+ travelers.
These grassroots organizations look to fix an industry whose roots were often racist and exclusionary. Let these women be your role models. Let us stop celebrating the male-fantasized archetype of female travelers and stop bolstering the narrow image of what a traveler looks like. Instead, let us define what it means to be a real woman who travels on our own terms.
Thank you for this article. Sometimes we need a reminder that we are not (and do not need to be) these women in stock photos. And thank you for the beautiful photos of real women traveling.
Too true of an issue! I’ve had issues with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl expectation with my dating life and it’s just not what real travel life is or who I am. Stupid narrative expectations. My friend and I made a commitment to document our “real travel faces” when backpacking Europe, which largely just included us making very unattractive faces in different iconic and not so iconic places around Europe. Those are still some of my favorite travel photos because it shows a reality (being tired/hangry, having sore as feet, being lost with a setting sun, being unimpressed after the social media snapshot’s been taken) that we can look back on, know was ours, and laugh about.
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Amazing post Nikki! I am a twenty-something traveller and I have doubted myself a lot when comparing my identity as a ‘female traveller’ to these impossible archetypes laid out for us on social media. With acne flare-ups, classic English rose skin that never tans and my lack of washboard abs, I have convinced myself in the past that I couldn’t possibly expect to become a successful female travel blogger if I failed to conform to this “female traveller” image. However, I have learnt that despite my flaws, I feel my most beautiful, empowered and confident when I am travelling despite having no make-up on and looking sweatier than a turkey on Christmas Day! A female traveller is a female who travels, simple, and I am saddened to see that the male gaze has even dominated what should be the most free-spirited industry and and human experience. The fact that you are physically and mentally fit enough, brave enough and curious enough to travel as a female is all that should be celebrated here, and the image of the female traveller needs to be challenged. Beautiful photos!
I love this post! I’m a travel blogger myself and often end up scrolling through pages of stock images to find female travelers who are as you said, not sexy, white and thin, which there’s nothing wrong with but it just doesn’t represent me as a colored person. My goal is to start taking more of my own photos in order to counter this. Good to hear someone else voice this.
Nikki, Thank you, I really like this article and photos of the real travelling women are beautiful. As a serial-traveler for almost two years now I often find myself without any makeup, unable to get motivated to have a salad to keep a perfect figure. Oh, the stories I could tell about the attempts on healthy, budget eating while on the road. no matter the miles I walk, the bags I carry or the number of stairs climbed, healthy lifestyle is a struggle.
And don’t even get me started on dating. The moment people hear you are travelling (even if you are staying in one place for longer then two month) there are usually two possible thought processes:
1) I am not even going to bother to get to know her, she will be leaving soon, or
2) yes! solo-female traveler, she is going to be easy no string attached sex toy for me.
Not a surprisingly I don’t find either of these too options attractive.
Great words! Prior to travelling, I would look at what is deemed by society as “Instagram perfect” photos by women that fit into this archetype and wanted to live the lives they led. Though while and after travelling, I realized that what I loved more about travelling than standing in front of the camera and taking an enormous amount of photos just to get the ‘perfect shot’, I rather enjoyed capturing the candidness of the moment where it encapsulates the feelings of that time. I have also found myself behind the camera a lot more often where I wanted to challenge myself and experiment in ways of trying to capture the culture. Trying to show culture through photos is a different task (which is why writing is often of company to better achieve this), yet I learned that this a personal challenge that I would like to tackle myself. Stumbling upon this blog and movement is such a gift because it reassures me that what I believe in is worth working towards! Can’t wait to keep following 🙂
I love the idea of this magazine and, trust me, I am not ‘pixie dream girl’ either!’ I’d like to think of myself as ‘educated observer with the choice and freedom to enjoy all of life’s offerings, who also happens to enjoy comfortable shoes and wind blown hair.’
Should anyone be interested, I have plenty of photos of me (in the state mentioned above) and multitudes of story ideas from 20 years of international travel to over 80 countries.
I look forward to seeing this magazine grow and develop. Best regards for future success!
Thank you, Carla! We can’t wait to share the first issue with you!
I really appreciate this post. Thank you for the representation and food for thought!
Thank you for your comment!
I love this article. Thank you for writing it! I was only wondering the other week why there are so many girls twirling their skirts in travel photos! How do they all look so impeccable? Where do they get such swirly skirts? And also, WHY are they twirling?! Who is going to the Taj Mahal or the great pyramids like “ok, this is amazing, I need to twirl”.
Just they other day I found myself dragging my baggage through the streets of a small town in France after two days of flights, buses and barely 2 hours of sleep. I had no make up, I was sweaty and suddenly my shoe broke. So there I was, tired, gross and walking the streets of France in one shoe like “I am just never going to be one of those twirly skirt girls am I…” 😉
Preach! I always have trouble finding images that represents with integrity. You nailed it, Nikki.
Yes. This is so spot on. Here’s to diversity! I get so nauseated by monotonous archetypal expectations of me as a female traveller. Thanks for the article — and everything really. I’m blown away by y’all.
Love this article and we’ve shared it on our Travel Play Live – Women’s Adventure & Lifestyle magazine page. We hope you’ll all enter our Happy Place Cover Photo competition – real images of real women who are in the moment in their happy place. #happyplacetpl. The winner is published on our front cover. Comp closes 14 Feb. Cheers, Nat (Executive Director).
I’m also a travel writer, soon to launch a blog with my husband, but before going off on my own, I worked with a magazine that preferred to publish glamorous images. I had to choose white women with long hair, preferably blonde, and in a sexy pose. Every time I tried to choose someone who was a brunette with short hair or someone with a few curves, they deemed it not the fantasy. I found that awful. Why is the blonde goddess the only kind of fantasy? And were we only curating the magazine for men’s preferences?
The photos you chose that were of the real travel women were absolutely stunning. I am trying my hardest to revamp my Instagram feed to follow more of these strong, intelligent women of all ages.
So very true! We live on a sailboat, and go many places and see many kinds of people travelling, none look like the stock magazine fantasy images!