Why People are Fabricating their Vacations

This is a friendly reminder to not compare yourself to others. We are all guilty of it to some degree, whether it’s about worrying how fast you graduate from college compared to your classmates, your income, where you live or even how quickly you can get married and have kids. A new concern being added to the mix, though, is how your vacation scales up to the getaways of others in your social circle. This can be attributed to, you guessed it, picturesque posts on social media.

But guess what—so many of these too-good-to-be-true photos and reviews are really just that. A recent study from flight comparison site Jet Cost shows that Americans are actually exaggerating how great their vacations are. Two-thirds of the 4,000 people surveyed admitted to lying about their experiences, with the weather, excellence of accommodation and amount of sightseeing being the most frequently fabricated.

Survey respondents said they lied to avoid embarrassment and to appear worldly and well-travelled. Other commonly misrepresented parts of vacations include how much they drank and how much they spent.

It’s really not that hard to enhance pictures from your trip or even straight up lie about travelling with some light photo editing. Social media influencers and travel bloggers have been caught altering their photos before. Some have even purposely tricked their followers to show how easy it is to fake a trip.

So this brings us back to the main point: try not to compare yourself to others, as everything is not as it seems. If you see someone you follow on social media posting extravagant vacation pictures, be happy for them and take it with a grain of salt. You don’t know everything that is happening behind the photos.

And when you are on vacation, the only person you need to make happy is yourself—not your followers. So, do what makes you happy. If that involves taking photo after photo and posting, go ahead, but do it for you. Or, follow the road less traveled: put down your phone and take it all in without distractions.

Whitmanythought: Speaking of vacation, stay tuned for my new posts about Turks and Caicos on Mondays and Thursdays for the next few weeks!

This study was originally reported by Travel Pulse.