Are we ruining the places we claim to love

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I used to think I had this one figured out. As someone who hates crowds, I always travel when no one else is traveling since I have the freedom to do so. No crowded restaurants, no lines for anything, no tourists, period. Then I was recently traveling to Paris a few months ago, in the "quiet" month I'd specifically chosen for that reason, and ran into two people I knew from New York, both there for the same reason I was. None of us had done anything wrong. We'd all just followed the same smart logic to the same conclusion. That's when it started to sink in–the timing I'd worked out for myself wasn't actually mine. It wasn't even rare anymore. I thought I was avoiding the crowd, I was just early to where the crowd was arriving next.

There Is No Off-Season Anymore

There used to be a window when a place actually got to exhale. The shutters came down, prices dropped, and whoever was left had it to themselves. It was quite simple as that. Ask anyone now when the "real" time to visit somewhere is, and you'll get some version of honestly, whenever, if you do it right, which sounds like insider knowledge and is actually an admission that the quiet season doesn't exist the way it used to. We didn't fix overcrowding. We just smoothed it out across the calendar so it stopped looking like a problem.

Here's the part nobody wants to hear– "go off the beaten path" isn't bad advice, it's just advice that stops working the second more than a handful of people act on it at the same time. I no longer post the location of my safe havens and favorite places because I love them exactly as they are and because they're mine, at least for now. But I do have friends in travel and hospitality who don't operate under the same rule, and I've watched it happen from the sidelines more than once: a spot gets mentioned once, by someone with the right following, and six months later it's on every "hidden gems" roundup.

Menorca is the clearest example I have lived through. I went a couple of years ago for a retreat, and what I loved the most about it is that it stayed untouched by the mass tourism that has invaded the other Balearic islands of Mallorca and Ibiza. This summer, several travel influencers and travel advisors are posting about Menorca, so now I am already looking for somewhere else to go. Nobody in that chain meant harm. They were doing their job, recommending something they felt was some big secret they could sell their followers or clientele. Sadly, the people working hardest to keep a place quiet are outnumbered by the people whose job is the opposite.

The Myth of the "Undiscovered" Place

Can we please retire this word immediately? No place is undiscovered. Someone has been living there, working there, closing the same shop every night for years before any of us showed up with our version of the story. When people call a place “undiscovered,” what they usually mean is that it has not yet been discovered by people like them. That is a statement about their own experience, not a fact about the place.

I hear this term constantly, especially from creators in travel and hospitality. They are genuinely lit up by a place they have just found. I understand that feeling because I have felt it too, encountering somewhere special. The difference is what happens next. My instinct is to keep the place close or share its beauty. For others, discovery becomes currency: proof of taste, a source of clout and, eventually, a revenue stream. The place stops being an experience and becomes content. But once discovery becomes currency, it rarely remains exclusive for long. The same place begins circulating through the same fifteen accounts and three geotags, with each person presenting it as something they found. By the time the next traveler arrives, the discovery has already been discovered many times over, and it no longer is the place you want to be or originally fell in love with.

What Happens After We Share It?

I think we tell ourselves sharing is contained—this is for my people, the ones who already get it. That's not really how it travels through the social media algorithm though. I post A LOT, but I've gotten strict about not saying exactly where I am unless I want people to know. Places I don’t want discovered have no geotag, no address, sometimes not even the town.

And still, a photo gets saved, then screenshotted, then turned into a "you HAVE to find this" text to someone else's someone else, and eventually enough people are asking the same question in the comments that the answer finds its way out anyway. A restaurant with twelve tables doesn't have a contingency plan for thousands of people trying to track it down. Something always gives. It is usually the price, the pace, or the exact thing that made it worth sharing about in the first place.

I'm not saying stop sharing. I'm saying that withholding the pin only slows things down. It doesn't stop the place from getting found, it just buys it a little more time before it does.

I’ve watched a friend post about a place with no location tagged, just real love for it, and within a year it had doubled its tables, raised its prices and brought in an investor who wanted it to scale. There was no intention to cause harm, but good intentions do not erase impact. Sharing the place publicly helped change it.

That is the part I did not want to admit. It was never really about the pin. A neighborhood loved by outsiders has a way of eventually being built for outsiders, whether or not anyone shares the exact address. Public affection is still exposure, and exposure has consequences.

Travel Is Not the Problem

I want to be clear, because I am not about to tell you to stay home or feel guilty for wanting to see the world. My time living in Paris remains one of the best decisions I have ever made for myself. It opened up much of Europe to me and still shapes how and why I travel today. Being somewhere unfamiliar and having to figure it out on your own is one of the fastest ways to truly meet yourself, and become who you truly are. The instinct toward slower, quieter, more honest travel is a good one. It is worth protecting, not talking ourselves out of. The problem was never leaving home. It is the quiet assumption that a place has been sitting there waiting for us to find it, as though we are the interesting part of its story rather than one visitor passing through a story that began long before we arrived.

What Do We Owe the Places We Love?

I don’t think the answer is silence, and I no longer believe withholding the pin is enough (though I still withhold on some of my posts). What we owe these places may be something closer to restraint. Sometimes that means naming the city rather than the neighborhood or address. Sometimes it means spending in a way that actually goes back into the place and the local community, rather than simply passing through it and taking your obligatory IG photo. And sometimes it means asking yourself before you post, whether this place needs the audience you are about to send its way, or whether the kindest thing you can do is allow it to remain imperfect, unoptimized and still becoming whatever it is becoming on its own timeline.

I don’t have a clear answer to that question and I’m not sure there is one yet. But I have started asking it before I post, and that, more than any rule, feels like the real shift.