The Anti-Travel Guide: 44 Places You Shouldn’t Visit in 2025

Not because they’re bad, but because they’re geotagged, saturated, and priced to collapse.

Welcome to the 1st Annual Strange Loop Anti-Travel Index

This is the final instalment in Strange Loop’s System Studies: Travel series and the one that flips the script. You’ve seen the aesthetics, followed the platforms, maybe even queued behind them. Now comes the part no travel list will show you: where not to go next.

This is a 44-destination global collapse index, scored and ranked by cultural degradation, aesthetic saturation, infrastructure strain, and symbolic erosion. If you’ve ever dropped €4,000 on “untouched charm” and ended up in a content queue, this is the data that explains it.

It’s the definitive anti-travel guide, and it’s only for subscribers. Not because it’s exclusive, but because knowing how collapse works is the only way to stop accelerating it.

🔐 Subscribe to get access to the full index and see what’s already been lost… and what’s next.

How to Read the Collapse

Every January, the usual suspects assemble their soft-power wishlists: The 52 Places to Go, Top 30 Hidden Gems, Best Underrated Destinations for 2025. These travel guides become collapse accelerants upon publishing. A place appears on one of those lists and, within 12 months, its Google Trends chart spikes, its ADR inflates, and its coastline becomes a hashtag farm. Call it what it is: branded entropy with a booking link.

This report is the opposite.

You’re not imagining it. Every place you want to go is already ruined — or being filmed by someone ruining it right now. Aesthetic sameness. Cultural simulacra. Entire coastlines reduced to Pinterest boards. The great irony of 21st-century travel is this: the moment a destination becomes desirable, it begins to die. And by the time you hear it’s “underrated,” it’s already entered its final phase of collapse.

As always, we’re dropping vibes and replacing them with data: a forensic, tiered collapse index charting the cultural, economic, and symbolic degradation of 44 destinations worldwide. Not what’s trending — what’s unravelling. No vibey adjectives. No “hidden gem” clickbaits. Just multi-dimensional scoring based on:

• Tourism pressure metrics (tourist-to-resident ratios, year-on-year visitation spikes, infrastructure redlines),

• Economic displacement patterns (hotel price inflation, real estate surges, the conversion of neighbourhoods into content factories),

• Platform signal velocity (search volume spikes, geotag saturation, TikTok cloning aesthetics),

• And a cultural impact layer tracking brand colonisation, occupation collapse, and the transformation of local ritual into traveller-friendly performance art.

Each destination’s score is a composite of quantifiable strain and symbolic erosion — a data-backed autopsy, not a listicle. We’re not here to tell you where to go. Just the opposite.

Methodology: Verified, Not Hyped

This isn’t just a list of places that feel overhyped, overcrowded, or vaguely disappointing — it’s the first data-backed diagnostic model that explains why. That sensation of spending £4,000 for “untouched charm” only to queue for a photo spot next to a Nobu and a Zara? That’s not just taste inflation, that’s actually predictable via quantifiable tracking, and this index traces it across four distinct dimensions:

• tourism saturation

• economic distortion

• platform signal velocity, and

• cultural erosion

Each destination is scored out of 40 total points, using a weighted composite across four scoring categories. These are structural indicators of degradation, drawn from hard data, municipal filings, infrastructure reports, platform dynamics, real estate trendlines, and cultural fieldwork.

The Scoring Framework

30%: Tourism Pressure (TP): Measures the raw strain of tourist presence versus local capacity

• National/regional tourism boards (e.g. Visit Portugal, Thai TAT, Greece GNTO)

• Municipal visitor caps, port/cruise stats

• Population data via national census authorities

• Infrastructure strain reports (waste, water, road capacity)

• UNESCO cultural site visitation and stress indicators

25%: Economic Displacement (ED): Measures market distortion caused by tourism

• STR Global, hospitality market reports (ADR inflation vs. 2019 baselines)

• Real estate market reports (Knight Frank, Savills, national housing registries)

• Municipal housing offices (short-term rental licensing, affordability metrics)

• Commercial business turnover reports (e.g. Lisbon, Barcelona, Canggu)

• IMF & OECD tourism GDP contribution data vs. household income indicators

25%: Platform Signal Analysis (PSA): Measures how destinations are commodified and accelerated algorithmically

• Google Trends longitudinal data (indexed 2018–2025)

• YouTube + Pinterest search volume via public APIs and tracking tools

• Verified geotag growth via platform-accessible APIs (e.g. Instagram Places, TikTok location tagging)

• Documentation of aesthetic pattern replication (e.g. “Santorini Sunset”, “Tulum Jungle Bath”)

• Presence in editorial listicles (NYT 52, T+L, CN Traveler, Forbes, American Express Travel)

20%: Cultural Impact Assessment (CIA): Tracks symbolic and lived erosion of local identity

• Hospitality and brand development filings (e.g. Soho House expansion materials, Marriott pipeline)

• NGO and journalistic field reporting (e.g. Express UK, Al Jazeera, Le Monde)

• Community protest records, preservation campaigns

• Media language corpus analysis (how local festivals or rituals are framed: sacred → content)

• UNESCO, UNWTO, WTTC whitepapers on overtourism, authenticity risk, and cultural commodification

Why These Sources Matter

This model pulls publicly available, peer-verifiable data, not social speculation. When we say Lisbon’s historic core is structurally collapsing under Airbnb saturation, we’re not guessing, we’re referencing municipal filings showing short-term lets outnumbering long-term housing 3:1. When we call Santorini post-authentic, it’s not because it’s cliché, it’s because 6.1 million geotagged posts show the same filtered image replicated so many times it breaks the algorithm.

The goal isn’t to critique travellers but instead to expose the supply-side mechanics of collapse — the way editors, platforms, hotel groups, and governments turn cultural sites into digital commodities and then wonder why nothing feels “real” anymore.

Normalisation & Tier Assignment

To ensure destinations of different sizes and geographies could be meaningfully compared, all metrics were normalised relative to:

• Local population (for tourism strain)

• Pre-pandemic economic baselines (for ADR, rent, real estate)

• Historic platform benchmarks (for geotag and search growth)

• Cultural significance + exposure resilience (e.g. degree of UNESCO protection, remoteness, infrastructure cap)

The result is a final composite score out of 40, allowing every destination to be placed within one of four Collapse Tiers — each representing a distinct phase in the lifecycle of symbolic and infrastructural exhaustion.

Glossary of Terms

Let’s begin.

The Four Tiers of Collapse

1. Tier 1: Already Extracted: Collapse is complete. Tourist-to-resident ratios exceed sustainable limits, infrastructure has been re-engineered for short-term volume, and real estate inflation has displaced locals into service roles or exile. Culture no longer unfolds — it’s scheduled. Aesthetic saturation is total, and the destination now functions primarily as a content stage. These places aren’t evolving. They’re looping.

2. Tier 2: Summer Death Watch: Collapse is underway. These destinations are experiencing rapid visitor growth, ADR inflation above 150%, and early-stage brand colonisation. Infrastructure is straining, but not yet broken. TikTok and Instagram are driving visibility spikes, and listicle indexing has triggered predictable saturation feedback. What was once local is now being platformed. Collapse here is not theoretical — it’s calendared.

3. Tier 3: 12–18 Month Warnings: The cracks are visible. Tourist volumes are rising, but infrastructure hasn’t been upgraded. Search traffic is surging, geotags are replicating, and “undiscovered” is already trending. Property speculation is driving early displacement, and cultural rituals are being reframed as seasonal activations. These places still function — but barely — and the pressure is building from all sides.

4. Tier 4: 2030 Fragility Forecasts: Still real. Still slow. But exposed. These destinations maintain cultural integrity through remoteness, regulation, or community ownership, but are increasingly visible in platform loops and editorial coverage. Visitor volumes are low, but search interest is climbing. Many are protected by limits — for now. This is the final tier before the algorithm decides it’s time.

This isn’t about naming and shaming, it’s about mapping and timing. Collapse is no longer anecdotal, it’s trackable. And if you want to understand why your “underrated” find felt like a queue in a €500 T-shirt, this is where the answer lives.

TIER 1: ALREADY EXTRACTED (35–40 pts)