Chetan Bhagat has good reason to be unhappy with influencers

Chetan Bhagat, India’s original influencer, is unhappy with influencers. Or so he wrote in a recent column in The Times of India, where he suggested that influencers have sucked the joy out of travel and hospitality, one reel at a time. This after having seen a reel made by a “reasonably popular food influencer” about this quaint little café at a small distance from where he lives. He and his wife decided to visit the cafe, only to find a 30-minute waiting period, a crowd spilling onto the streets and the restaurant struggling to meet orders. It seems Bhagat wasn’t the only one who saw the reel.

This isn’t an isolated example—for the lack of a better phrase—of online influencing gone wrong.

Recently, the Railway Protection Force had to stop many tourists walking on rail tracks near Dudhsagar falls in Goa. The falls were a reasonably well-kept secret in Goa and weren’t exactly burgeoning with tourists even during tourist season. But travel influencers revealed this beautiful place to the world at large and things changed.

During the rainy season, over weekends, hundreds of people land up at the many forts that line the Konkan coast of Maharashtra. These forts were popular with trekkers, but influencers have put them on the tourist map, and now they attract so many people on weekends that there is literally no place to move.

Clearly, there is a problem. An obvious reason for this lies in the fact that many zoomers and millennials find meaning in their lives through travel. Influencers want to cash in on this. But the trouble is that they go to a place and make a reel over a week day. Tourists, having seen these reels, throng these places all at once on weekends, making more reels and taking more pictures, and posting them across social media. The pictures and reels posted on social media can be ‘liked’, turning the experience into a number and making social comparison easy.

As Micael Dahlen and Helge Thorbjørnsen write in More Numbers Every Day: “Pictures… are subjective. You may think that your vacation is just as good as mine if you only look at two, often extremely different pictures. But if your vacation picture gets 200 likes and mine only 50, it appears obvious to everyone… that your vacation is better than mine.”

One impact of this is “an insidious, self-reinforcing effect.” So, if I publish a post featuring pictures of a beautiful place and it gets a lot of ‘likes’, it stokes a need to click and publish more such pictures of more such places in search of even more ‘likes’.

If the post doesn’t get enough ‘likes’, then the need is again to publish more, because that is a way to get the desired response. This creates a self-reinforcing effect, where pictures of places get seen again and again, which results in more people wanting to visit these spots.

As Luke Burgis points out in Wanting: “The imitation of superficial things is a part of everyday life,” and social media makes it very easy to do just that. As he further writes: “Before Facebook [or Instagram or Twitter for that matter], a person’s models came from a small set of people: friends, family, work, magazines and maybe TV. After Facebook [and all other social media], everyone in the world is a potential model.” We want to do what everyone else around us is doing. Now, thanks to social media, the sample of people who make models for everyone else has grown in size. And if more and more people are travelling, we want to travel as well.

So, what can be done? In economic theory, when the demand for a product or a service goes up, without a commensurate increase in supply, the price rises. This ensures that more entrepreneurs enter the race to make that product or service. The ensuing supply fulfils the extra demand and its price again falls below reasonable limits. But this theory doesn’t work in the case of tourist destinations. For example, the supply of Dudhsagar falls cannot suddenly increase if more tourists land up than the destination can handle.

One way out is to implement a congestion charge to let people enter these places, with the price of entry rising when demand goes up. But this will present its own challenges. First, the local government will have to ensure that there are no routes to enter the destination other than those where a congestion charge needs to be paid before entry. This is easier said than done. Second, market based pricing doesn’t always go down well with people. And third, this would also test the very limited state capacity of India’s local governments.

Finally, in order to stay relevant, travel and food influencers will have to keep discovering new places, leading to these places being seen by many more people. The flip side is that many more people will flock to such places than can possibly be hosted. As Burgis writes, this will stem from the fact that “smartphones project the desires of billions of people to us through social media… [leading to] our addiction to desires of others that smartphones give us unfettered access to.” Also, people might get bored of the older isolated places made famous by influencers and possibly move on to newer ones. So, the problem of overcrowding caused by online publicity will keep moving from one place to another.

Vivek Kaul is the author of ‘Bad Money’.