On the new, the rare and the performance of travel
For me, travel is both deeply personal and inherently exclusive. That exclusivity has little to do with luxury and everything to do with access to the rare and unrepeatable.
It exists in moments that feel privately held: standing alone at Perito Moreno under the hush of night, sharing a conversation with a local who reveals unseen layers of their Caribbean home, moving through the snow-laden stillness of Svalbard where silence feels almost tangible or setting your own unhurried rhythm in Tarangire.
True exclusivity lies in the depth of experience, offering a sense of discovery that cannot be easily replicated or commodified – something that feels entirely your own, rather than something performed for others.
Justin Wateridge, Managing Director
Insights from the field
Svalbard | Sue Grimwood
Svalbard is often sold on the promise of polar bears and, of course, they are a big part of the draw. But I think it’s a mistake to make them the whole point. The archipelago is so compelling because of the range of life you can encounter in a place that, at first glance, seems almost empty. That sense of emptiness makes you feel like you’re waiting, suspended in time, until a movement on the ice or a sound from the water shatters the illusion.
On a good small-ship voyage, you are likely to have walrus hauled out, seals on the ice, Arctic foxes scouring the tundra, reindeer grazing in that slightly improbable High Arctic way and seabirds crowding the cliffs. Then, if luck is with you, something more unexpected: a pod of beluga whales moving alongside the ship or a humpback breaching, one of those sightings that can happen once in a season.
That’s where the size of the vessel matters. A smaller ship gives you a better chance of responding to what the Arctic offers, rather than following a fixed script. You can still travel in the hope of seeing polar bears, but the real reward is realising how much else is out there waiting for you.
Take this further with a conversation: Sue Grimwood
St Lucia | John Faithfull
St Lucia is a side of the Caribbean I want more clients to see. This less-visited island has real character: it’s mountainous, green, and far less predictable than the Caribbean that people often have in mind. It has a physicality that I love, with its steep roads, volcanic heat, ocean-salted breeze and tree frogs murmuring after dark.
I like that St Lucia invites you to explore the island. Charming old towns give you a sense of the island’s history and towering Gros Piton challenges the more intrepid to lace up their hiking boots, whilst Sulphur Springs adds something completely different: a dormant volcano you can drive into, with the last eruption dating back to the 1700s. It’s exactly the sort of slightly odd, memorable experience I enjoy building into a Caribbean trip, giving you a story to take home.
If you find yourself considering a Caribbean getaway for the Christmas period, my question is – why not St Lucia?
Take this further with a conversation: John Faithfull
Argentina | Paul Bird
I’m very much looking forward to sending clients to El Calafate in the coming season. For the first time in more than two decades, the walkways of Perito Merino will be open at night, giving you a rare chance to see the glacier beneath a sky full of stars.
What interests me about this experience is not just the novelty of being there after dark, but how different it will feel. By day, Perito Moreno is rightly busy: people come for the scale, the sound, the drama of the ice. At night, once the crowds have gone, I imagine it becomes something quieter and more elemental. It’s a reminder that even the most familiar landmarks can still surprise you, when you see them in a different light.
Take this further with a conversation: Paul Bird
Tanzania | Illona Cross
If you’re travelling as a family or a small group, there’s a lot to be said for having a safari space entirely to yourselves. In Tanzania, I’m seeing more interest in this sort of set-up: not just because it feels more private, but because it changes the rhythm of the whole journey. You can move at your own pace, eat when it suits you and shape each day around the people you’re travelling with.
One new private residence near Tarangire National Park is a good example. Set on a granite kopje above the park’s eastern boundary, it has five suites and sits within a 10,000-acre conservancy where elephants move through at dawn, lions hold the acacia woodland and leopards disappear into the grass. With space for up to ten guests, a dedicated team, a private guide and exclusive safari arrangements, it gives you the feeling of being properly looked after without losing the sense of being out in the landscape.
Take this further with a conversation: Illona Cross
Bulletins on the board
Reef storytelling in Australia
On the Great Barrier Reef, Darkinjung woman, Master Reef Guide and marine biologist Natalie Smith brings together Creation stories and contemporary reef science, offering a way to understand the reef through both Aboriginal knowledge and marine conservation.
A ring of fire over Patagonia
On 6 February 2027, parts of Argentine Patagonia will fall beneath the path of an annular solar eclipse, creating a rare chance to witness the “ring of fire” from one of South America’s most dramatic landscapes.
The Baku to Tbilisi sleeper returns
The overnight train between Baku and Tbilisi has returned after a five-year hiatus, once again linking the capitals of Azerbaijan and Georgia by rail, with newly refurbished sleeper carriages restoring one of the Caucasus’ most evocative cross-border journeys.
Filed by our Specialists
Table for one in Morocco’s southern Atlas | Jarrod Kyte
A private lunch in an olive grove, a ride through the palm groves of Skoura and the company of a guide who knows the old kasbahs by more than their names. Jarrod Kyte’s account of Morocco’s southern Atlas is a reminder that access doesn’t always need to announce itself. Sometimes it’s simply being in the right place, with the right person, and no need to hurry.
Read Table for one in Morocco’s southern Atlas
Saudi Arabia: a solitary man | Paul Craven
Paul Craven travels Saudi Arabia in a way few outsiders have: alone and curious enough to sit with what he finds. From fast-food dining rooms divided by gender to a landscape that confounds its own reputation, this is a country encountered honestly – not as a destination, but as a place in the middle of becoming something more.
Read Saudi Arabia: a solitary man
Alaska: in seach of wilderness | Chris Packham
Nineteen travellers, one small ship and the company of one of Britain’s most passionate naturalists. Chris Packham joins a Steppes expedition into south-east Alaska’s fjords and glaciers, to witness the 49th state’s iconic wildlife and to reckon with what it means to seek wilderness on an overcrowded planet.
Read Alaska: in search of wilderness
A question on our minds
Are we travelling, or performing travel?
A word has slipped, almost unnoticed, into everyday speech. Performative. It’s not new. But suddenly it is everywhere. Politics is performative. Outrage is performative. Kindness is performative. Grief, allyship, work, friendship, morality. All are now examined for signs of performance.
The accusation is simple: you are not doing this because you believe in it. You are insincere. You are doing it because someone is watching. And, it seems, someone alway is.
So what does that mean for travel? Is travel itself becoming performative?
The evidence is not difficult to find. We tick destinations from bucket lists we did not write. We travel to places made desirable by algorithms, magazines and people we have never met. We photograph the same view, from the same angle, at the same time of day. Tick. We share where we are, what we’re doing, who we’re with and, increasingly, what all this says about us.
We are adventurous. We are successful. We are curious. We’re important enough to be travelling for work. Interesting enough to be travelling for pleasure. Influential enough to be invited. Affluent enough to escape.
We do not simply go somewhere. We announce our arrival. I say this as someone who professes to dislike “all that”.
I travel for myself, I insist.
I write because I want to perfect a craft. Because I harbour the vain, perhaps faintly ridiculous, hope of one day becoming the writer I have always imagined I might be. I share because I want to educate. To illuminate. To encourage others to look again.
And yet I notice the likes. I read every comment. I enjoy the approval of strangers. I am no more immune to applause than anyone else. Perhaps that is the uncomfortable heart of the question. Not whether travel is performative, but whether performance automatically makes it insincere.
But travel has always contained an element of display.
The Grand Tour was not undertaken quietly. It advertised wealth, education and social position. Explorers returned with journals, artefacts and stories. Mountaineers published accounts of their ascents. Travellers pinned photographs into albums and subjected neighbours to long evenings of projected slides.
We have always wanted to return with evidence. We were there. We saw it. We survived. We became someone else.
The campfire story became the lecture hall. The lecture hall became the travel book. The travel book became television. Television became Instagram.
The technology changes. The human instinct does not. What’s changed is the speed, scale and availability of the audience. Once, the story came after the journey. Now, the audience may be present before it begins. That alters the relationship between experience and its telling.
A photograph once recorded that something had happened. Now, sometimes, something happens because it will make a good photograph. A place becomes not a destination but a backdrop. A meal cools while it is arranged. A sunset is viewed through a screen. A square, temple or market is cluttered with people performing spontaneity, holding poses and repeating moments that are supposed to appear unrehearsed.
The traveller is no longer merely in the landscape. The traveller becomes the subject of it.
This is easy to mock. It is also easy to become smug.
There is a particular kind of traveller who congratulates themselves for being different. They go to the less fashionable place, stay in the less obvious hotel, leave the phone in their pocket and regard the influencer with weary contempt.
They travel authentically. Or so they tell themselves. But authenticity can become a performance too. Nothing is more carefully constructed than the appearance of not caring. There is a paradox here. Those who are least interested in appearing cool often appear the coolest. The harder we chase authenticity, the more artificial it becomes.
Perhaps the way out is not to reject performance, but to examine intention.
There is a difference between travelling and then sharing, and travelling in order to share. There is a difference between allowing an audience into an experience and allowing the audience to design it. The problem is not the photograph. It is when the photograph matters more than the moment. The problem is not influence. It is when influence replaces curiosity.
Influencers themselves are too easily dismissed. The word is used as an insult, yet travellers have always influenced one another. Writers do it. Photographers do it. Broadcasters do it. Travel companies do it.
Steppes does it.
The finest travel storytelling has always made us want to go somewhere, see something or understand someone differently. Technology has simply removed the gatekeepers. The enthusiast may become the expert. The amateur may become the broadcaster. The traveller may become an agent for friends, followers and strangers.
Some of this is shallow. Some of it is generous, informed and brilliant.
The accusation of being performative can therefore become its own form of laziness. It allows us to question motives we cannot know.
Someone films a moment of wonder. Are they ruining it, or preserving it?
Someone shares a journey. Are they seeking validation, or offering inspiration?
Someone writes about a place. Are they turning experience into status, or trying to make sense of what happened there?
Often, the answer is all of these at once. Human motives are rarely pure. We can travel for ourselves and still want to be seen. We can write with integrity and still crave praise. We can live in the moment and still reach for the camera.
The danger is not that travel has become performance. Travel has always been performance. The danger is that the performance becomes the journey; that we visit only what is recognisable, value only what is shareable and mistake visibility for meaning.
The purpose of travel is not to prove where we have been. It is to discover what being there does to us.
A photograph says: I went. A story says: I changed. There is room for both.
Perhaps, then, we should be slower to accuse and quicker to ask a simpler question: did I live this experience before I tried to tell it? Because there is nothing wrong with returning home with stories. That is what human beings have always done.
We should simply remember to live them first.
Giles Cross, Marketing Director
Giles Cross is a traveller in search of perspective. Through essays, expeditions and long-distance motorcycle journeys, he explores the idea that the greatest value of travel lies not in the places we visit, but in the people we become because of them. Marketing Director at Steppes Travel, he lives in the Cotswolds with his wife, Illona, and is happiest when slightly lost.
If something you’ve read has struck a chord, feel free to drop us a note. We’re always happy to continue the conversation.
