Travel Vloggers Share Insight About The Impacts of Travel Vlogging

This week I had a chance to interview two travel vloggers, Adam and Kathryn Frazer, about their travel vlogging experiences with their YouTube channel, Adventures of A+K. When talking to Kathryn, she gave a wonderful description of what their travel vlogging jobs entail at the moment.

“We currently are traveling full time around the United States in our self-converted Sprinter van. We create detailed travel guides and YouTube videos that share the must-visit local eats, popular and off the beaten path sights, and tons of tips to make planning your next adventure a whole lot easier.”

This interview took place over email and we discussed some of the different impacts travel vlogging has on the tourism industry and how the Adventures of A+K travel vlogs impact their viewers. The interview started with some questions about their travel vlogging experience.

Q: How long have you been travel vloggers? How long before becoming travel vloggers did you think about becoming one?

A: We shared our first video back in October of 2018 and it is crazy that it has almost been three years! We had secured the name “Adventures of A+K” on YouTube in June of 2018, just in case we ever wanted to start a channel, but to be honest, the thought of filming ourselves in public was so terrifying to us that we never thought we’d actually do it…but here we are!

Q: On that note, what helped inspire you to start travel vlogging?

A: Before YouTube, we had a travel blog which we still create content for, and the goal with our blog has always been to help others travel by providing tips, suggestions of places to eat and things to do, and provide an itinerary they can use.

At the time, we were writing “travel diaries,” which were basically very long recaps of our trips, in addition to more helpful itineraries and guides. We had started to watch other travel vlogs on YouTube and thought that making vlogs could be a fun way to replace those diaries by showing our actual experiences instead of just writing about them afterward.

Q: Why do you create travel vlogs? What helps motivate you to continue creating travel content?

A: Our biggest goal with our videos is to help others get out there and explore, whether it’s visiting the places we share in our videos, or encouraging them to just get out into their own backyard. We believe travel does not have to be crazy expensive, take a ton of vacation days, or even be far from home. And we love getting to highlight popular and lesser-known spots in the United States that offer unique history, things to do, and delicious food!

If we are being honest, creating travel content is a lot of hard work and is definitely not a nonstop vacation like people may think. We spend many, many hours researching, planning, storyboarding, filming, editing, and doing post-production work. But what motivates us to continue doing this is knowing that we have helped people plan their own adventures. Whenever we get messages that someone used our videos or website to plan their trip, it makes us so incredibly happy and fulfilled!

Q: What was the process like for becoming travel vloggers?

A: For us, the first thing we did was secure our YouTube channel, which we did months before we actually built up enough courage to start filming. After that, the next big step was buying some gear! While you can film a vlog on any type of camera, including just your phone, we decided to go all in and buy a Sony camera, a gimbal, and a microphone to hopefully help us make the highest quality videos we could. Over time we have expanded our gear to include another camera, a drone, a GoPro, and other lenses.

From there, the next step was to just film a video! This was the scariest part and filming does still give us anxiety some days, but it’s something that becomes more comfortable over time. After filming our first video, we learned how to edit it, publish it to YouTube, and then forced our family and friends to subscribe and watch it.

We’ve learned a lot over the years about different editing tricks, filming techniques, how to tell a better story, how to write better titles and do SEO, and how to be more confident on camera, but the hardest step was just getting started! It’s daunting to put yourself out there for the world to see (and sometimes criticize) and growth can be slow-moving for a while, but if you are passionate about something and have value to share, the right people will find you!

Q: How has travel vlogging impacted both of your lives personally and professionally?

A: Travel vlogging has completely changed our lives. From a professional perspective, we both went from having traditional jobs, I was in marketing and Adam was a teacher, to being self-employed and running our website and YouTube channel full time. This took years of hard work and working insane hours to accomplish, but we are excited to be able to do what we love for a living for hopefully the rest of our lives!

Personally, it has also had a big impact, both positively and negatively. We have made new friends because of YouTube, both with others who travel full-time and also with people who watch our videos. The community we have been able to create is by far the highlight of vlogging!

However, being in the public eye can be really tough for our mental health. People can be vicious online and it can be really difficult to receive hurtful comments. The positive outweighs the negative most days, but as someone who suffers from anxiety, social media can be a very toxic place at times.

Q: Please describe the relationship you observe between travel vloggers and the general tourism industry.

A: There is definitely a positive and negative relationship between travel vlogging and the tourism industry. On one hand, travel vlogging helps open up people’s eyes to new places to explore, educates them on the history of these places, and can help bring business to different towns and local businesses.

On the other hand, creating more exposure to places can have harmful impacts, such as over-tourism. For example, national parks have become extremely popular in the last couple of years and with travel vloggers, including ourselves, sharing these places, it’s helping contribute to more and more people visiting them, which is having negative impacts on the land and limited resources.

As travel vloggers, we have a big responsibility to share how to respectfully visit different places. It is our job to demonstrate proper Leave No Trace principles, follow all rules, and share important information to ensure others have a safe visit and provide a positive impact to the place they are exploring.

Frazer is not the only travel content creator observing these similar relationships between travel content creators and the tourism industry. In the article, “Liked To Death: Is Instagram & Social Media Ruining Travel?”, author and fellow travel content creator, Matthew Karsten, also describes the relationship between travel vlogging and the tourism industry. Both Frazer and Karsten touch on over-tourism being a consequence of the relationship between travel vlogging and the tourism industry.

Q: What kind of impact do you feel travel vlogging, in general, has on the tourism industry?

A: Despite the potential negative impacts we shared above, overall we think vlogging helps the tourism industry, as it’s great advertising for different places and businesses. Tourism boards now regularly use travel content creators as a paid method of advertising because these creators have an engaged audience that trusts their suggestions and will likely visit places that they promote.

Q: Are the impacts different for domestic United States travel compared to international travel? Please explain why or why not.

A: As primarily US travel content creators, we feel an even greater responsibility to share respectful practices when promoting international travel, as there are cultural differences that may not be as well known.

But overall, we feel both the positive and negative impacts are the same for both the US and international travel. Vlogging can help bring more tourists to both domestic and international destinations, but it can also cause harm by creating over-tourism and by people not treating places with respect.

Q: As travel vloggers, what kind of impacts do you see your work having on the tourism industry both in the United States and abroad?

A: We think, and hope, that our vlogs have had a positive impact on the tourism industry. From the comments, messages, and emails we receive, we know that our videos have encouraged people to visit different states that they wouldn’t have really thought about before, such as West Virginia and South Dakota, as well as different small businesses that they may not have known about.

Overall, we try to set a positive example anywhere we go. We have started to list Leave No Trace principles on every outdoor-focused guide on our website and in the pinned comment of any outdoors-related travel vlogs in order to try to help educate others on how to properly explore the outdoors.

Q: What kind of feedback do you receive from viewers about the places you make vlogs about?

A: We thankfully have received mostly positive feedback from our videos. Our goal is to make the most helpful videos possible and put the focus more on the place and less just on us. And one of the most common pieces of feedback we get is how our videos have helped others plan their own trips to the same places. But even if someone cannot travel to one of the places we share, we still get a lot of positive feedback that our videos have taught them something new!

Q: Do you have people message you about how your videos have impacted them? If so, please give an example.

This question ties back to my previous article, “Travel Vloggers Bring Relatability and Comfort to Their Viewers”, where I describe more in-depth, the impact travel vloggers have on their audience.

A: We do! And honestly, it is what keeps us going when we feel overwhelmed by this job. One really cool comment we got the other day was from a guy that lives in Michigan who we have chatted with a bunch before we went to Michigan ourselves.

“I want to say how much I appreciate your emphasis on hiking. Your videos have inspired me over the past year to buy an Osprey, Camelback, headlamp, hiking pants, etc., to get the AllTrails Pro app, and to go do things I’ve never done before. I’ve hiked 340 miles, roughly 313 of that in Michigan. Next week, I’ll take my first major A+K-inspired trip. The first videos I saw from you were in South Dakota, and that’s where I’m going. Following you has been my COVID highlight, and a respite from all the challenges that go with that. It’s been life-changing. Thank you!”

Q: As travel vlogging has become more popular, how do you see this increase in popularity of travel vlogs, especially during the pandemic, affecting the tourism industry?

A: Before the pandemic, international travel was extremely sought after, as it’s seen as more glamorous than exploring your own country, but we think one positive thing about the pandemic is that it opened people’s eyes to the many adventures right in their backyard.

The United States is incredibly diverse in both scenery and different cultures and we think that travel vlogging, as well as other types of travel content, helped get people excited about places closer to home. We also believe travel vlogging opened people’s eyes to other ways to travel outside of airplanes, such as road trips and van life, which were considered safer and socially distant ways to explore.