Travel Writing in the Age of TikTok

Every editor I pitch to has the same question now: "Could this be a video?" The honest answer is sometimes yes. The more honest answer is that videos and essays do different things, and the things essays do are worth defending.

A video shows you what a place looks like. An essay tells you what it felt like to be there. These are not the same thing. The first is a tour. The second is a translation.

I have nothing against the video format. I have plenty against the editorial assumption that it has replaced the essay. They coexist the way photography did not replace painting.

If you write travel and you are tired of being told it is dead, here is the data point I lean on: my most-read piece of 2025 was a 2,400-word essay about a single afternoon in a small city in Portugal. It outperformed every video I made about the same trip combined. Nobody asked me to put it on TikTok.