We all wish we were on vacation right now.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the money and time to abandon their responsibilities for a week and go lay in the sun.
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But what if you could become that well-traveled social media influencer you’ve always dreamed of, without leaving the comfort of your own home?
A new trend of ‘Fakeationing’ or ‘Fake Vacationing’ has emerged on Instagram.
It involves photo-shopping yourself into pre-existing travel photos, and intentionally posting the pictures in order to make people believe that you’re actually on vacation.
Yeah. It’s wild.
The concept became popularized after an Instagram Influencer was accused of faking her travel photos.
Swedish Influencer Amelia Liana faced a fair amount of backlash after posting what seemed to be very badly photoshopped pictures of her in Paris, France.
Though she admitted to reworking the photos, she claimed that she was actually in Paris.
“So I did one picture, shot it and didn’t think it looked that nice … so I took a different background … and when I put it up nobody noticed so I thought, this is good.”
Now, you can pay a company to create fake travel photos for you.
Fake A Vacation is a Nebraska based Photoshop service that allows customers to have photos of themselves placed within any backdrop in the world.
Customers order their preferred packages online. The staff will suggest certain clothes to wear in the pictures, which are then transferred onto other backgrounds. Packages start at $19.00.
There are thousands of scenes to choose from.
“About 3% of all the photos we’ve done are in [our] travel design book,” says Teri Llach, chief marketing officer at photo-editing and design service Krome Photos.
They even offer simple scenes like kitchen backdrops and backyard scenes for folks who just want better home photographs.
People have started to fake their vacations as a social experiment.
Youtuber Shyla Olive faked a trip to Paris in January, then released a video explaining the tactics she used to make the trip believable.
She set alarms in the middle of the night so that she could post her photos according to the time difference in France. She also used footage of herself in the Atlanta airport from the last time she was there.
Another Youtuber named Quentin Hyde faked an entire trip across Europe.
Hyde intentionally made his photos fake-looking in order to see how many of his followers would notice.
He even used old Instagram photos as the base images for the photo-shopped scenes.
But why do people fake their vacation photos?
Fake A Vacation marketing lead Tom Eda explains that it is all about public perception.
“They fake it … sometimes because the actual vacation is too expensive, so they plan this way or sometimes they do it to get others envious.”
If fakeations are your thing, then go for it!
Some people see more worth in travel than the photographs that come out of it, but others don’t, and that’s okay.
Nothing’s stopping you from photoshopping your little heart away from the comfort of your couch…just make sure that the photos don’t look too fake.
