4th of January, 2026
Few arguments are as self-evident as this one: To learn about some place, you should travel there; traveling makes you learned, and the learned are well traveled. But as so often with truisms, this is not true. I claim that those who stay at home and occasionally read about foreign places on the internet are better informed than those who go somewhere far away on vacation.
To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ₺100,000 liras to spend as well, but they simply don't need it to win.
A common objection is that learning is not adequately described as a collection of interesting facts. While coherent and deep models of the world are always built on lots of facts, I will admit there are certain aspects of physical places that cannot be captured in text. Luckily, we live in the 21st century, and can listen to every radio station and TV network from everywhere, can view 360 degree photos of most streets in the world, or live streams filming and commentating the exact goings-on in public spaces. In the extremely rare case you have a specific question that cannot be answered with public data, someone on social media will answer it readily. This leaves only the qualia of taste, smell, and touch, which are important for emotionally connecting to a place, but not for becoming educated or forming consequential opinions, since verbal descriptions of them are enough.
Travel is often cited as a way to obtain unbiased information, so much so that "unbiased" and "on the ground" are synonyms. This is in general true, but relies on the digital medium having more adversarial pressure to make you think something than the channel of physical travel. An extreme counterexample is the case of the United Fruit Company arranging travel to Guatemala for journalists and selectively presenting "facts on the ground" that supported the Guatemala-hawk view that the country was quickly turning Communist. The stories those travelers wrote contributed to the decision to have the CIA overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954. Small versions of the United Fruit effect have worked on me and other victims of travel; for example, I have visited both Bulgaria and Poland, and was toured through monasteries and churches in Bulgaria (because indeed they are somewhat exotic, beautiful, and very interesting) but not in Poland, leading me to believe Bulgaria is significantly more religious than Poland. According to the Eurobarometer 2020 survey though, in both countries the identification with religion is actually equal.
I have one big worry that might undercut my case to you: It is indeed true that digital media channels are sometimes much more biased than tourism, namely when political propaganda is dominant. To name the obvious example: I would agree that it's a good idea for US citizens today to visit China in great numbers, and vice versa. Again I would claim a more efficient way of education per se is looking around Shenzhen on Street View, listening to street interviews, browsing some Bilibili. But travel is better at imparting some emotional connection to a place, which could be important if geopolitical tensions rise.
A counterargument is that for many past wars, especially in Europe, at the very least the elites were extremely well-traveled in the countries they were attacking. In recent memory, Crimea became a favorite for Russian tourists after the annexation in 2014, and until today Russian elites travel West, uninhibited by their government. Things would indeed be different if rural Dagestanians who are about to be drafted would start booking trips, but it is so telling that the digital media access, not the flight ticket is where the Kremlin intervenes. If someone wanted you to not learn about a culture, would they rather take away your opportunity to travel, or to go on the internet?
The novelist Natsume Sōseki, perhaps the defining cultural figure in Japan before WWII and later face of the ¥1000 bill, was a traveler to London and prolific translator from English. Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.
To touch on the positive flipside, it is really beautiful how rich of a cultural understanding can be cultivated without ever setting foot in the country in question. I admit the following is a weird claim, so I'll pose it as a question: What if the Tokyo audience in a concert of Bach's cantatas (say, a good one, by Masaaki Suzuki) has a deeper understanding of German culture than the average German resident? My grandfather likes to tell the story of meeting a group of Japanese travelers who wanted to sing German folk songs with him, but had to disappoint them because he didn't know any from the idiosyncratic selection they had learnt. One might take this as a story of how travel helped those misguided foreigners learn that they were wrong, but I see it as a story of cultured individuals getting unlucky. The man who invented the modern conception of the cosmopolitan didn't even leave is his home town.
Tourism is deontologically wrong. To see this, let's compare it to another fun activity, going to the night club. The more people go to the night club, the more fun it is. Nobody wants to go to a night club with three people in it. Traveling has the opposite property: Advertisements for travel show, without fail, empty beaches, empty mountains, even empty towns. It feels off to be visitor number three-hundred-thousand-and-eleven to a supposedly sacred shrine, so the industry is predicated on suspension of belief. In interviews with people in the business of tourism, including ones of excellent moral character like Rick Steves, you will always notice this awkwardness.
Travel is economically important, and residents benefit indirectly from the GDP increase. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that on net, tourism impacts me negatively. Currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I am slightly annoyed by tourists almost every day; being filmed and photographed at all hours of the day, being asked to help enter buildings, in short lowering the level of trust in my community. These shallow interactions hinder me from seeing the human in them, render me incurious about what they are about. Meeting people from other places is incredibly fun and I love things like conferences for that, but travel as a synonym for tourism makes you less, not more connected to the place you are visiting.
One of my earliest memories is a five-or-so-year-old me at castle grounds in Potsdam, being asked by Chinese tourists to pose, alone, for a photo. Looking back, it seems the only interesting thing about me could have been that I have blond hair. I feel a need to say to them, look, there are a lot of blond children on Baidu image search, try using that. I wish I could have instead talked to the guy in Chongqing who spent his evening reading about Potsdam online.