Everyone's Going to the Same Six Places
How algorithms, influencers, and our obsession with ratings flattened travel — and why I’m starting Co-Sign.
After a week-long trip that turned into two months of hotel hopping along the Mexican Riviera, my vacation fling–turned–boyfriend’s car sputtered out. When it became clear I wasn’t making my flight, we decided to do what two delirious kids drunk on dopamine do: spend another night together.
We frantically Googled and Yelped in the backseat of an Uber, trying to find a hotel that could serve as a home base for our final hurrah. It was a “romantic” resort with a 4.7 star Google rating for $550.
It was the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in. The pool was sardined with sweaty tourists. The sheets were damp and moldy, and the food was almost impressively inedible. As I sipped a watery mudslide contemplating the life choices that had brought me there, a realization took root:
The entire ecosystem of travel recommendations is broken.
The problem with relying on review sites like Google is that excellence is highly subjective. A hotel that gets a glowing review from a family of four is unlikely to land a high score with a single woman traveling alone. Review sites, with their tidy little ratings, can’t tell you what actually matters — how a place feels. They ask “Do most people like this place?” rather than answer “Is this place right for someone like me?”
Instead of offering solutions, social media presents another set of problems. Instagram and TikTok are a swamp of sponsored content thinly disguised as trustworthy guidance. Our feeds are flooded with influencers peddling “hidden gems” with millions of likes and AI slop sending everyone to the same six places. It’s why you can spend weeks cobbling together saves and screenshots and still land somewhere profoundly mid.
When the algorithm rewards illusion over honesty, the result is a kind of pornification of travel — images edited so aggressively they barely resemble the actual place. We end up chasing impossibly turquoise beaches instead of what we’re actually looking for: connection, curiosity, surprise.
So, what’s left to trust? Friends. Always friends.
Recommendations from friends sit in the sweet spot between trust and taste because they come from someone whose sensibility you share, whose incentive is supremely simple — they just want you to enjoy yourself!
Friends’ recommendations are a map of their unique tastes and hard-won wisdom: where they danced until 6 a.m., flirted with a sexy stranger, and cried over the perfect ceviche. Those stories, those recommendations, are what I want more of.
Somewhere along the way, travel stopped being about discovery and became about being on display — a mode of being perceived rather than a mode of perceiving. The commodification of travel has turned the world into content. We care more about how a trip looks on our feed than how it feels in our bodies. We chase overedited photos and overhyped restaurants, and in the process, we miss the messy pleasure of discovering a place — and discovering our place in it.
That’s why I’m starting Co‑Sign, a travel publication for people who travel to change how they see, not how they’re seen.
Each weekly edition follows cultural insiders through their world, tracing where they go, what they notice, and why it matters, along with Google Maps so you can explore through their eyes.
Travel is the lens, but the heart is resisting the algorithm with real recommendations from people whose taste you can trust: artists, writers, filmmakers, chefs, and other discerning creatives.
In other words, people whose Co‑Sign actually means something.
I’ve spent 14 years as a writer and editor, leading teams and shaping coverage as editor-in-chief at Mic and executive editor at Complex. My work has lived at the intersection of culture and politics, but my earliest beats were food and sex — pleasure as a way of understanding the world.
I’ve been dreaming up this project for over a year, but I’ve finally reached a point where hope outweighs hesitation. My goal is to create a community of people with terrific taste and messy hearts — unapologetic people who want to devour life like a ripe peach, even if it makes their hands sticky.
If you travel to feed your soul, not just your feed, you’re in the right place.
—S.
The line about travel becoming "a mode of being perceived rather than a mode of perceiving" is one of the best diagnoses of what went wrong. Glad someone finally put it that clearly. I'm genuinely annoyed I didn't write that first :)