Publish at April 21 2026 Updated April 22 2026
There's one question that isn't often asked before booking a ticket. It's not "Where am I going?", nor "How much does it cost?", but: "What do I really want from this trip?" We leave to rest, sometimes, but also to live a story with ourselves. That of the curious, open-minded traveler, a different story from that of the tourist.
And this is precisely where the tension begins.
Mass tourism is first and foremost a real social conquest. For centuries, travel was reserved for the elite. Paid vacations, cheap flights and all-inclusive packages have changed all that. Millions of people have seen the sea for the first time, discovered other countries, stepped outside the boundaries of their birthplace. This evolution has changed many lives.
But mass tourism is also structurally designed to eliminate surprise. The guide who speaks the visitor's language, the translated menu, the timed excursion - all these build an environment in which the other culture is present as scenery, not reality.
Tourist destinations attract visitors not only because of their material qualities, but above all because of the images, stories and symbolic values associated with them.
Source: Dean MacCannell - The symbolic power of tourist attraction
https://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/2785
The sociologist John Urry called this the "tourist gaze" (The Tourist Gaze, 1990): the tourist doesn't see a place, he sees a representation of that place, prepared for him, conforming to what he expected to see. In the tourist's mind, this representation ends up replacing the place itself.
Entire villages have gradually adapted their architecture, markets and practices to fit the image that visitors expect. Not out of cynicism, but out of economic necessity, gradually, almost without realizing it.
Dean MacCannell posed this question as long ago as 1976 in The Tourist: does the traveler seek the authentic, or the reassuring representation of the authentic?
Fifty years on, the answer often seems to be the latter.
At some point, people decide to travel differently. Not to go further or stay longer, but to travel differently. They call it immersion.
The difference? They stay with locals, take local transport, get on the wrong bus, mispronounce words, smile a lot because they don't know what to say. Less comfortable, but exactly the experience they're looking for.
Researcher Adam Galinsky has observed that it's not traveling that changes people, but being placed in a situation where their automatisms no longer work(Academy of Management Journal, 2015).
When you don't understand the language, you observe more; when you don't know the codes, you pay attention to gestures and silences.
You become, temporarily, someone who has lost his or her automatisms. Someone who learns without a net, who sorts and adapts in real time. And this is precisely what the immersive traveler is looking for: to find himself again.
Immersion travel doesn't promise a change of scenery. It promises something stronger than that: a fresh look at what you thought you knew. A certainty that you are becoming different. Not because we've seen extraordinary things, but because we've experienced ordinary things elsewhere.
Beyond mass tourism and immersion, there's a third type of travel that many people are still unaware of: digital nomadism. In the image of the digital nomad lies something both seductive and troubling, in almost equal measure. Seductive: the freedom to choose one's life context, not to let oneself be fixed by the vagaries of birth. Disturbing because this freedom is often based on an economic asymmetry that nobody really names.
To live comfortably in certain countries, one's income must be significantly higher than that of the majority of local residents. This differential transforms neighborhoods, drives up rents and gradually creates enclaves in which relatively well-off foreigners live among themselves, in a city they don't really inhabit.
The income differential between digital nomads and local populations contributes to rising rents, the displacement of residents and the transformation of neighborhoods into enclaves for wealthy visitors.
Source: Hannonen, Olga - "Emergent geographies of digital nomadism: conceptual framing, insights and implications for tourism". Tourism Geographies, vol. 26, no. 3, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2023.2299845
Tourism transforms territories, landscapes and social relations, beyond the simple movement of people.
Source: Stock, Mathis - "Vers une théorisation de l'approche géographique du tourisme". Mondes du Tourisme, n° 2, 2010. https://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/271
To be a digital nomad is to have a choice. But choosing to move doesn't guarantee encounters. On the one hand, yes, you can choose to live like a local. Rent a small apartment, chat with the corner shopkeeper, get to know the baker, etc...
But on the other hand, you can spend six months in a foreign country socializing only with other digital nomads, with no understanding of the social realities of the neighborhood you're passing through.
Mobility without attention is not openness. It's sometimes a sophisticated form of withdrawal from the world.
Philosopher Hartmut Rosa(Résonance, 2018) has proposed a simple word for what people are looking for in experience: resonance. A moment when what we experience really touches us, changes us a little. This is what most travelers are looking for, without always formulating it that way. A conversation that surprises. A landscape that stops you in your tracks. A way of doing things that suddenly makes relative a certainty we thought was universal.
You can't buy these moments in a catalog.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow, 1990) has shown that it is the intensity of engagement, not the medium, that determines the quality of an experience.
A group trip can produce this moment. So can an evening spent seriously exploring the culture of a distant country from home. What counts is the openness with which you enter into the experience. And this openness can be cultivated here and elsewhere. It can be taught. It can be learned.
This openness is perhaps the one thing that all ways of travelling have in common, when they really work.
John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 - Jean-Michel Dewailly
https://journals.openedition.org/geocarrefour/8521
Main, P. (2024, April 3). Flow State. - www.structural-learning.com/post/flow-state
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