35 Times Travelers Were So Stunned By The Place They Visited, They Just Had To Share Pics In This Group

We reached out to the people looking after the subreddit, and one of them, Jippiejee, agreed to have a little chat with us about it.

As you can imagine, a community of millions of people requires a fair share of moderation. "We receive a [ton] of spam (not unexpected, of course, since there's a business aspect to the topic of this subreddit: travel agents, hotel booking apps, etc. trying to promote themselves on Reddit), but we employ a lot of automation to proactively avoid these posts becoming visible to our community members," Jippiejee told Bored Panda.

"Our moderators are active participants on the subreddit and living/traveling around the world to give us 24-hour coverage when managing the place. It's generally a very friendly community though, we don't [have] much abuse or other bigotry that contaminate other online communities."

Without diving deep into data, Jippiejee thinks that Italy and Greece are the top destinations for the older and honeymoon crowds, generating a lot of questions about itineraries and transportation.

For younger folks and budget backpackers, "South East Asia is still king, closely followed by South America with the typical questions about money ('Will $20 per day be enough for Vietnam?')," the moderator explained.

But if we were to disregard different demographics and take a step back to look at the broader picture, we'd see that in 2017, before the pandemic transformed the tourism industry, France had the biggest number of arrivals (86.9 million), followed by Spain (81.8 million), the US (76.9 million), China (60.7 million), and Italy (58.3 million).

Traditionally, the advanced economies of Europe, the Americas as well as Asia and the Pacific have been the world’s major source markets for international tourism.

However, emerging economies in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have shown fast growth over recent years, largely due to the travelers' rising levels of disposable income.

That being said, Europe still remains the world's largest region for outbound tourism, generating almost half of the world's international arrivals.

"The pandemic sent the subreddit into hibernation, with just a handful of posts every day, mostly asking about entry requirements and vaccination documents to travel or return home," Jippiejee added.

"Most of our active users started posting 'memories' of better moments with pictures from previous travels, hoping everything will return to normal soon. [It was] a bit like [an empty city pub] where three drunk guys are reminiscing about the good old days rather than a lively beach bar."

Currently, a small but increasing number of destinations are lifting all of their covid-related travel restrictions, regardless of vaccination status, including some European favorites.

The UK, Ireland, and Hungary all swelled the ranks this month. The Caribbean island Aruba, the Portuguese archipelago Madeira and north-central Asia's Mongolia have also lifted their main covid entry requirements.