10 years of Instagram has rendered the terms meaningless

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Me Jamie, English and 52 years living in Hong Kong and I know the know the place - I personally completed 2,324 Private Tours (6,000+ guests) from 2011 - 2020 and was considered one of the finest Private Tour Guides in Asia.

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Learn more | Why I hate the term Hidden Gems and Secret Spots

Learn more | Hidden Gems & Secret Spots - A myth in Hong Kong

Hidden Gems and Secret Spots in Hong Kong - the Myth

10 years of Instagram has rendered the terms meaningless

Two of the worst cliches in the world of Tourism

This is my 3rd blog post on this subject in recent times, much to the amusement of my friends who think I take this far too seriously but every day my email inbox is overflowing with messages from Travel and Tourism sites and Hong Kong Lifestyle magazine sites talking about Hong Kong Hidden Gems and Secret Spots.

In addition I subscribe to Google Alerts so I get 20+ messages a day from media sites around the world who match up with my key words and all I get is messages and press articles about Hidden Gems in Hong Kong.

At last count I get over 90 messages a day related to Travel and Tourism in Hong Kong, most of these sites do a minimum of one email a day 7 days a week and quite a few do 2 emails a day - talk about information overload.

I am quite aware that Instagram started in 2010 but it really did not start taking hold with image uploads until 2014 and it is now completely out of control, Instagram has 200 million photo’s uploaded a day or roughly 6 billion (with a B) a month and over 70 billion per year.

How can this possibly help tourism? and what makes it worse is how can any small business use Instagram as marketing tool for Travel and Tourism.?

I was using Instagram back in 2014 to promote my Private Tour Business and 10 years later I still have NEVER received a single enquiry for someone wanting to take my tours, if I uploaded nice tourist spot images in Hong Kong (I have 169,000 + images on my Flickr site) I was lucky to get 2 - 5 likes and I uploaded a lot photo’s every day, I simply gave up and just started uploading images of cars in Hong Kong but I am lucky to get 20 likes for a great front | side on image of a Lamborghini, to me it just all seems utterly pointless.

Learn more | Explore Hong Kong Instagram Account 147,000+ followers

A great friend of mine who operates Hong Kong Greeters has a freelance guide working for her who is apparently an Instagram sensation with 2000+ posts and a remarkable 147,000 followers and her images can be quite startling but it barely has any impact on tour bookings - click on the button above for Explore Hong Kong and their famous Hong Kong Instagram account.

My theory is quite simple, social media is completely ruining tourism for everyone and I am pretty sure I am not the only one who thinks like this.

The Hong Kong Tourism Board which has quite a nice website is now offering stuff regarding AI and hidden gems! and naturally every Tom, Dick and Harry out there will no doubt copy what they are doing.

My writing blog posts about hidden gems and secret spots is actually pointless in the overall scheme of things, I know because I can track how many people have opened a specific blog post and I always think why am I bothering!

I bother simply because as a visitor to Hong Kong you deserve better, forget the notion that there are secret spots and hidden gems in Hong Kong if you are here for 2 days you have to pick and choose what to see very carefully (which is why you need the expertise of a Private Tour Company)

Take a look at these figures

we have 72 beaches in Hong Kong
we have 263 Islands (many not accessible unless you charter your own boat)
we have 579 named Hills and Peaks in Hong Kong, quite a few of them have glorious views
we have at least 550 hiking trails
Hong Kong is 430 sq miles or 1,114 sq km, most of it is “green” but a lot of it whilst not inaccessible can be very hard to get to even with out famous public transport - a lot of these remote spots - well plan on being out for the whole day.
we have 134 declared monuments
we have almost 9,000 historic buildings

What I am saying is that be assured that plenty of people in Hong Kong have been there, done that and taken a million photographs and uploaded them on social media and trust me, a lot of these images are just rubbish.

… and if you do bother to read on please note my comments about Choi Hung Estate, the classic Instagam shot which is totally deflating when you see it in person.

Lifestyle magazines are the worst offenders, they Photoshop their images to such a degree that whilst it looks magnificent as an image, in real life it will look nothing like images in an article and none of these articles seem to mention it might take you 4 hours to get there and 4 hours to get back, not an effective way of using your time in Hong Kong as a tourist being here for just a day or two.

As a photographer with an awesome camera and a bit of talent I can tell you now that Hong Kong weather is quite fickle, no matter what time of the year you are here it can be sunny, cloudy or raining or all 3 in one day, no amount of trickery on Photoshop (or your Instagram filters) can turn a cloudy day into a sunny day and you know a lot of times, a cloudy day just takes all the vibrancy out of an image.,

One of my favourite shots I have taken of Victoria Harbour with Hong Kong Island in the background, it is NOT a hidden gem or a secret spot but I was lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with the Aqua Luna Fishing Junk sailing into the image and it just happened to be on a sunny day in the middle of winter.

The Peak - The view of Aberdeen, Ocean Park, Deep Water Bay, Repulse Bay & Stanley in the distance | Island South from Severn Road, The Peak, Hong Kong. A rare view so to speak which very few people will get to admire as it is from Severn Road at the Peak, quite the hike and frankly it is easier by car, well worth the effort I might add.
.. and you will notice it is a cloudy day, but I took the image anyway.
It took me 48 years to locate this view but that does not make it a hidden gem or secret spot, I imagine many thousands of people did exactly what I did to get this image.

So here is my advice, forget the terms secret spots and hidden gems, great picture opportunities can present themselves at any moment, so book a tour with a Private Tour Company, let them handle the logistics and you concentrate on looking for great photo opportunities.

One of my recent Hidden Gems posts - text below or click on the links at the top of this blog post

Social Media has significantly transformed the way travellers discover new places, leading to an overuse of terms like hidden gems and secret spots. This trend seems to have been overlooked by numerous tour companies in Hong Kong and worldwide.

Ever since Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, X (formerly Twitter) and other social media sites became mainstream, literally hundreds of millions (if not BILLIONS) of photographs and video’s of tourist attractions and peoples personal holidays snaps have been uploaded to the web, basically completely destroying any sense of joy and wonderment at stumbling across something amazing on your holiday (I should point out there are exceptions!)

Here in Hong Kong, every Tom, Dick and Harry starting with the Hong Kong Tourism Board likes to use these awful cliches and they became cliches because for the most part people cannot be bothered to think about the message they are trying to convey, with a bit of research there are plenty of other phrases that can be used to set you apart from everyone else.

As a retired Private Tour Guide with 2,324 tours under my belt (and who has lived in Hong Kong for 52 years) I have lost count of the number of people who requested going to various sites and such because they had heard it was a hidden gem or a secret spot and quite simply when you are doing a 3,4,5,6 or 8 hour tour, going off to this hidden gem in general is a complete and utter waste of time as there are very few places in any city which have that wow factor and why bother travelling 30 minutes there, 30 minutes back for an explanation and a snap with your smart phone. it does not make a lot of sense to me! I should point out that I always gave my guests the option to visit “the place” whilst pointing out the timing factor.

**The Noon Day Gun in Hong Kong a really cool and unusual thing to do in Hong Kong and hardly anyone bothers to go.**

I must also point out that there are tour companies in Hong Kong that can put together an Instagram themed tour for you and will have no problem at all calling them hidden gems or secret spots!

The other reality that I had to explain to my guests was that the vast majority of holiday images are taken with a smartphone with questionable image quality and naturally every one uses filters to give the image that wow factor and when you see the hidden gem or secret spot in person you are really disappointed! particularly if it is a cloudy day.

In Hong Kong a friend of mine did a blog post in 2021 with this headline

Choi Hung Estate – the Most Instagrammable Public Housing in Hong Kong

Type it into Google and see the images.

The images have very vibrant colours and look cool, but in person on a cloudy (or sunny day) the colours are very drab and it is a very deflating moment! but it does not stop hundreds of mainly young people trekking there every day and it is quite a hike on public transport from downtown so to speak.

If you look at the header image of this blog post which I took you will see that it is far too vibrant and that’s because I put the image through Photoshop, in reality the colors are quite drab.

…. and this leads me back to how social media has changed tourism.

Note the jolly nice image below of the monkey sat on the fence that I took.. it absolutely is a secret spot (unless you live in Hong Kong!) but it is in a very remote spot which is accessible only if you have a car and trust me these monkeys (Rhesus Macaque) are really nasty buggers and not to be messed with, they have no fear of humans and will try and grab anything you are carrying… oh and did I mention they hunt in packs? and they are quite aggressive and will bite you and yes, because of social media a lot of people want to be taken there so they can snap those “cute” monkeys…… aaaaaaaggggghhhhhhh!

My thanks to Amy owner of Hong Kong Greeters who kindly took me to Monkey Mountain in her car just so I could get some pictures of these monkeys.

My favourite alternative term for hidden gems and secret spots was nailed by Atlas Obscura, the quirky Travel and Tourism site who simply say “cool and unusual things to do in Hong Kong” and yes, that makes them stand out in a very crowded field.

Golden Hill (Monkey Mountain), Shatin, NT, Hong Kong | One of Hong Kong’s so called “Hidden Gems”

In my mind, there are no secret spots or hidden gems in Hong Kong because of social media but the really great private tour guides in Hong Kong (my friends) will know places that are not overrun by smart phone toting gangs of young people looking for their 20 seconds of fame which are relatively accessible over the course of a tour and which have that wow factor.

Finally I should point out that there is one secret spot and hidden gem (sorry!) in Hong Kong that offers quite simply the most magnificent city view in the world (I am not kidding) located at Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island it is rarely visited by your average tourist | visitor because it requires a 20 minute walk there and 20 minutes back from the Peak Tower where most people go. There are plenty of Tripadvisor reviews about this place and many blog posts but there is a catch, the vast majority of people who go there stop at the wrong spot, the view is great but it is not the spot!

If you have a tour with one of my friends you can mention that you would like to see “Jamie’s spot at the Peak” and they will smile and nod…. I visited it for the first time on January 3rd 1972 and have been there over 6,000 times (in all weathers) it is my favourite place in the world.

I should point out that the 2nd best city view in the world is on Barker Road at Victoria Peak next to Jack Ma’s mansion, see below and amazingly almost NO ONE goes there which is odd as Barker Road hosts the homes of many billionaires and some very, very important people.

Again, if you want to visit this spot on Barker Road, book a tour with Amy at Hong Kong Greeters, she has a car (there is no public transport on Barker Road) as it is quite a long road, it is such an interesting place to visit.

The truly amazing view from Barker Road at Victoria Peak and almost NO visitors | tourists know about this place.

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This unique experience offers an authentic insight into the real Hong Kong, providing a deeper understanding of the city's culture, history, and local way of life.

Led by Jamie, a dedicated Hong Kong specialist and resident for 52 years, the experience covers many aspects of Hong Kong's identity, spanning its time under both British and Chinese rule.