Travel content has stopped being relaxing But is it really worth risking your life to travel?

At -56 degrees, on the coldest road in the world, a young man from Umbria plants little flags to keep wolves at bay. His name is Lorenzo Barone — he's been cycling his whole life, and his followers wait every evening just to find out where he's pitched his tent. He is one of the protagonists of extreme tourism, the trend that in recent years has taken over TikTok, Instagram and YouTube: creators cross entire continents by bicycle, on foot or by hitchhiking, often passing through countries that governments warn against in the strongest possible terms. The reason for its success is as simple as it is telling: in contemporary travel storytelling, the allure of danger and hardship has taken the place once held by luxury.

Travel content until recently was relaxing. It showcased an aspirational lifestyle, one of luxury hotels and no hardship in sight. But today we can no longer identify with a world that seems almost airbrushed — a continuous advertising campaign rather than a genuine account. Content that shows the destination without any of the effort it took to get there feels dishonest today, when everyone is informed about everything.

So audiences have begun to prefer watching creators struggle on their travels, like a reality show in which participants, followed by cameras, must find somewhere to sleep or cross a border. The appeal is the same that made Bear Grylls famous for years — the British adventurer of Man vs. Wild — or shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race: the pleasure of watching, from a safe distance, how a human being survives in extreme nature, waiting to see how they'll manage. Except that here there is no production team ready to step in if something goes wrong.

What's more, according to Jay Van Bavel, a social neuroscientist at New York University, the fact that these journeys are narrated by creators through daily updates forges a psychological bond with viewers, making them feel like participants in the expedition and as though they are experiencing its highs and lows firsthand. Tents and improvised meals replace infinity pools, and it is infinitely easier for audiences to empathize.

The extreme travelers

The reality is that these adventures involve far more than a casual bike ride or a hitchhike. In Italy, the most emblematic case is that of Alessia Piperno, a Roman travel blogger who documented her nomadic life on Instagram. Piperno was detained in 2022 in Tehran while Iran was swept by protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, and she spent 45 days in the prison wing reserved for political prisoners before being released through diplomatic negotiations.

Despite the risks, extreme tourism travelers set off anyway — partly because they regard the warnings as nothing more than ugly prejudice against the countries they're visiting, and partly out of arrogance. Such is the case of Ria Xi, a twenty-seven-year-old born in Beijing who worked at a Silicon Valley start-up and is now attempting to complete an ultramarathon from Russia to Portugal, or of Ian Andersen, who said he set out to leave behind his mental health struggles and the unhealthy ways he had been dealing with them.

In June 2025, Andersen was cycling through Iran — a leg of a 16,000-kilometre journey from Portugal to Japan. He had come to describe the places he visited, despite all the warnings, as "hidden gems." Yet on 13 June, Israeli airstrikes hit the country, some just a hundred kilometres from where he was. While Andersen got off relatively lightly, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, a British couple in their fifties who were motorcycling around the world, did not: arrested in Iran in early 2025 on espionage charges, they are now serving ten-year sentences in separate wings of Evin, the Tehran prison notorious for the detention and torture of political prisoners.

And even when detention doesn't come into the picture, danger remains the genre's most faithful travel companion. Over ten years on the road, Claudio Piani has endured nights spent hiding from steppe wolves and sandstorms in the deserts of Central Asia, a one-day arrest by Chinese police just north of Urumqi, and an incident in Kazakhstan in which a knife was held to his throat.

The difficulty of stopping

While it is certainly true that, as Andersen encourages, this kind of travel can change your life, it is equally true that extreme tourism has introduced a new dilemma that the old-school explorers never faced: the difficulty of stopping. A traveller who has already announced a leg of their journey to an audience of millions of followers will hardly abandon the challenge they've set themselves: backing out would, in the eyes of their fanbase, amount to a betrayal.

This relentless chase for the viral post will not stop on its own. It won't be stopped by audiences, who — as the success of this content proves — are not willing to give it up, and it won't be stopped by creators, who are willing to push the limits to win the algorithm's favour. As is always the case when it comes to dangerous trends, the only ones who can stop them are the owners of the platforms on which they spread.