Luxury vacation posts on social media can stoke envy; how to travel without overspending.

In February 2019, I returned to Houston to drive my mother and grandmother the eight hours to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for the funeral of my eldest aunt. This was the second of my grandmother’s 12 children to die, a grim occasion for any parent. After years of poor health, she hadn’t expected to outlive any of her kids.

I booked a $259-a-night room with two suites at a Residence Inn in downtown Little Rock, a 40-minute drive away. My grandmother was impressed with the size of the bathtub. We talked about my grandmother’s upbringing in rural north Louisiana, and she told me things I’d never heard about her and her life. She was tickled at the chance to talk about her hardscrabble youth. We mourned with family and friends in their dreary little hometown of Pine Bluff, which several times in my childhood was voted America’s worst place to live. On the trip back home, we bought my grandmother a three-meat barbecue combo from one of her favorite places in town. She finished it all before we even crossed the Texas state line and then dozed off as I drove in darkness and silence the rest of the way.

When we were finally back in Houston, she thanked me as we embraced. “I’ve never been on vacation before,” she said.

At first I was saddened that a two-and-a-half-star-hotel funeral weekend was the first and only “vacation” she’d ever had. But what’s also true is she was able to appreciate the low-budget trip because, at 92, she had no real sense of what anyone else was doing. I, on the other hand, am in a group chat with two people with a lot of disposable income and well-worn passports.

It was the Fourth of July when Spencer Hall dropped a picture of him hoisting a massive eagle on his right arm into our small group chat of college-football-loving friends. “Morning,” he said.

I immediately knew where he was: We’d previously had a conversation about our fascination with Mongolia—its immensity, remoteness, and desolation making it the most sparsely populated country in the world; its status as home to one of the world’s last surviving nomadic cultures; the history of Genghis Khan and his ruthless campaign to rule the region. And, of course, the country’s reverence for the golden eagle, which I first stumbled upon in a college textbook. I never forgot the picture of one of those large eagles perched on a falconer’s glove—it looked so majestic, so cool … so weird. And now my friend had improbably re-created that photo almost 25 years later.

It was no surprise that the lovably idiosyncratic Hall, who runs the website Channel 6 with his partner, Holly Anderson, and co-hosts the college football podcast Shutdown Fullcast, had followed his wanderlust to Mongolia. He’d already traveled extensively throughout Asia and was looking for a reason to go back, but somewhere he’d never seen before.

“It’s very, very different, and it is as far away as you can get,” Spencer said. “And most importantly, it’s supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be Outdoorsman’s Paradise, but in Central Asia.”

Bomani Jones, the other member of our group chat, went on a two-week trip to Spain a few days later. But he used a much different calculus in choosing his destination: “I want to be as comfortable on the road as I am at home.”

Jones, the host of The Right Time With Bomani Jones, spent most of his time in Barcelona but also briefly crossed over into Andorra, a tiny tax-shelter nation wedged between Spain and France. He spent time hanging out on the beach and generally enjoying five-star luxury accommodations.

I felt a pang of envy as my friends reveled in their adventures. And admittedly, a lot of that was because earlier in the year I’d planned to join Jones on his trip. But because of some unexpected family obligations, including a few that cost more money than expected, I couldn’t tag along. We were both disappointed.

It was a bummer, especially during a time when I really could’ve used a getaway from a few pretty grueling months. But I did take some solace in the fact that my wife and I had managed to book a babysitter for our 2-year-old son and spend a night away in June at a pricey beach hotel only 45 minutes away. We mostly spent that time in our room, scarfing down a pantry’s worth of snacks and looking out at the Pacific from our balcony. That almost felt like enough.

I realized that I was thinking of my group chat the way others do social media and travel influencers.

It’s hard to go on Instagram or Tik Tok without seeing an influencer—or even a well-to-do friend—posting from an impossibly beautiful destination like Greece or Iceland or the Amalfi Coast. For those of us scrolling at home, those pictures can convince us that luxury travel is the only travel worth pursuing. Suddenly, a quick spin through Las Vegas or a weekend on the balmy beaches of Florida doesn’t seem like enough. An overnight stay in a cozy bed-and-breakfast definitely doesn’t measure up.

“The media machine and tourism boards have millions of dollars to give to influencers and writers and all these people to make you feel like that’s how you’re supposed to vacation,” said Tariro Mzezewa, an Atlanta-based travel writer who hosts a new podcast called Peak Travel. “And if you’re not doing it like that, then you feel like you’re missing out.”

At home, mired in the grind of everyday life, it’s easy to forget that social media doesn’t tell the whole story of a vacation. The images that we scroll through on Instagram are often heavily curated, leaving out the thornier parts of travel.

“People don’t want to see the, like, ‘I got my wallet stolen’ or ‘I got food poisoning,’ ” said Victoria Walker, a D.C.–based reporter who writes a newsletter about travel called Carrying On.

However, Jones sees the value in showing a slice of the good life to his friends and followers. Before signing a lucrative four-year deal with ESPN in 2013, Jones said those images introduced him to parts of the world he’d never even considered before.

“I think what social media has done with travel is that it has demystified the idea of travel. I think it’s showing people that this sort of travel is more accessible than they realized,” Jones said.

But whatever you think of social media’s influence, it’s clear the emphasis on luxury getaways has encouraged people to overlook affordable opportunities closer to home.

“I think the number of people who get to experience that is so minuscule that I don’t think we should even be trying to have that kind of vacation,” Mzezewa said. “I think in many cases you’re just sort of better off not knowing what you don’t know. Like, for me, I’m just happy I get to go somewhere and have a really great time.”

Like my late grandmother, for instance. (She died in 2022 at the age of 95.) She may be an extreme example, but her appreciation for the simple pleasures of getting away inspired me. It’s a much more universal experience than taking a cruise to Turks and Caicos.

And none of the people I spoke with grew up going on long trips. Instead, they mostly piled into cars or vans and went to the nicest place nearby.

“We did go down to the Gulf Coast—yes, we did go to Destin and the Fort Walton area,” said Hall, who grew up in Nashville.

“We were not getting on a plane to go out of the country,” said Jones, who spent much of his childhood in the Houston area. “We just did a lot of driving to see family.”

That was my experience, too. As a child, I enjoyed staring out at the bucolic countryside on trips to visit our family in the Texas Hill Country and Arkansas. If I was lucky, my parents would treat me to dinner at the Catfish King off Highway 59 near Livingston, or some brisket fresh out of the smokehouse at City Market in Luling. In Little Rock, we always made sure to check out the only TCBY frozen yogurt shops in the country.

At the time, I thought I was really fortunate—I didn’t know much about what my classmates were doing over the summer or where they were going. There wasn’t much history of travel in my family, given that they came up in a time when Black people didn’t have much freedom of movement throughout the Jim Crow South.

That was also true for Brandon LeBlanc, who’s originally from New Orleans but now works as a tech attorney in Singapore.

“At the time, I understood being able to travel, especially for a Black family, was in and of itself a quite special thing,” he said. “But at the same time, I was very content just staying in New Orleans and being with friends.”

I met LeBlanc in 2007 when we were young professionals bunking with a mutual friend on a trip to Austin. Neither of us was making much money at the time. But over the years, I couldn’t help but notice on social media that LeBlanc always seemed to be visiting one idyllic destination after another. His posts on Facebook show that he’s visited South Korea, Japan, France, and Indonesia just this year.

“Moneywise, my travel has changed a lot over the years, and you can kind of divide it into two parts: before and after I moved abroad,” LeBlanc said. “After I moved to Spain in 2015, the frequency and ease of travel increased a ton. More generally, I’m still cost-conscious, while traveling and otherwise. I’m never trying to break the bank on a trip; I’m just trying to get out and see the world.”

And if you can somehow avoid travel envy—something I’m still working on—the reward is that seeing the world can look like an excursion across Mongolia, but it can also look like a road trip to the most miserable little town in America. Just ask my grandmother.