Why are more travellers tracking how many countries they have visited, and proudly sharing the number online? A recent master’s thesis by Emma Felin shows that this trend is far more than a niche hobby. It offers a window into how travel, identity, and social media intertwine in today’s tourism culture.
In tourism today, people don’t just travel – they show they travel. Over the last decade, a growing number of travellers have begun engaging in a phenomenon called country counting. This entails keeping track of how many countries they have visited, sometimes even listing the exact number in their social media bios. Platforms like NomadMania, which rank travellers by country counts, have brought global visibility to the trend.
To understand what country-counting reveals about modern travel culture, in my thesis, I investigated how travellers use these numbers to shape and view who they are. It explores how counting countries becomes part of identity, how sharing those numbers helps travellers gain recognition from others, and how the practice can grow into a visible marker of status within today’s tourism landscape. These questions help explain why the phenomenon resonates so strongly, and what it tells us about the ways people present themselves through travel in a highly connected world.
Beyond numbers: why counting matters
Counting countries may begin as a simple record of places visited, but for many it becomes deeply personal. A new destination is not just a dot on the map, it can symbolise courage, adaptability, or determination. For some participants, it represents proof of discipline and achievement. For others, it is a way to make sense of their experiences and growth.
Importantly, the record is rarely kept private. Country counts are shared in conversations and digital spaces, especially on social media, where they function as achievements on display. A country list or a colour-coded map becomes part of one’s public image. Through this act, travel transforms from a private experience into a social statement, one that signals who we are and what we value.
A cycle of identity-building
The interviews I conducted for my thesis revealed that country-counting is not a single act but part of a repeating cycle through which travellers shape, express, and reinforce their sense of self. Rather than forming all at once, identity is built in stages that loop back into each other, a process that continues with every new journey.
It begins with how travellers see themselves. Many interviewees described themselves as adventurous, curious, or determined. Travel becomes a stage on which to express these qualities, and the number of countries visited offers a simple, concrete way to make these characteristics visible.
The cyclic process of four categories emerged from the interviews. Figure by Emma Felin.
As travellers move through the world, emotions and experiences strengthen their self-image. Confidence gained from navigating new environments, pride in reaching a challenging destination, or gratitude for meaningful encounters all reinforce who they believe themselves to be.
Sharing these stories, whether through conversations, photos, or social media posts, becomes the next step in the cycle. Here, travel turns into a performed identity. By choosing what to show and how to frame it, travellers present a version of themselves to others. This stage is both expressive and strategic: it is about reliving the experience (emotions), but also about telling others something about oneself. As one interviewee explained, sharing travel content is at once a personal reflection and a performance for an audience.
[…] identity-building does not stop after a journey. Rather, it actively influences where travellers go next, what they prioritise, and what they hope to express.
Feedback from others; likes, comments, admiration, or simply the sense of being seen, forms an important part of the loop. Recognition can strengthen the identity being performed, making travellers feel more confident, more worldly, or more like the person they want to be. At the same time, the expectation of recognition can create pressure to maintain a certain image or pace of travel.
Finally, this feedback often helps shape future travel goals. Several interviewees said that when planning their next trip, they looked for destinations that would feel new, different, or meaningful, and sometimes, ones that would look good or add value to their country count. In this way, identity-building does not stop after a journey. Rather, it actively influences where travellers go next, what they prioritise, and what they hope to express.
Travel as performance
To understand these dynamics, I analysed interviewees’ stories through sociologist Erving Goffman’s performance theory, which views everyday life as a series of roles and stages. This approach helped reveal how travel today is not only something we do, but something we show. On the front stage, travellers perform for an audience, showcasing curated stories, milestone counts, and deliberated photos. Behind the scenes, however, they may experience doubts, exhaustion, or even anxiety about keeping up appearances.
This does not make the performance false. Rather, it illustrates that travel today is both lived and staged: we genuinely feel joy, pride, and wonder, but we also shape those emotions into public narratives that signal value, identity, and status.
Photo: Monica Silvestre/Pexels
The role of social media is not just to document this behaviour; it actively shapes and amplifies the practice. In combining travel with the logic of collecting, platforms turn experiences into a form of symbolic capital, a way to communicate worldliness, adventurousness, and competence. In a culture that celebrates productivity and achievement, a carefully curated travel feed becomes a kind of social currency. Problems arise when performance overshadows experience. When the goal shifts from the genuine engagement with places and cultures to collecting proof of being there, the depth of travel can be lost.
Beyond checklist tourism
One of the most important insights from the study is that collection and connection are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to visit many countries while still travelling mindfully and respectfully. The travel industry has an important role in promoting experiences that prioritise cultural depth over accumulation, whether through marketing that highlights cultural immersion or by designing opportunities that encourage presence rather than performance. At the same time, travellers themselves also have a role to play: to reflect critically on how and why they travel, and to stay aware of the social dynamics that influence their choices.
What this means for tourism
Country-counting is not just an individual habit; it reflects wider shifts in tourism culture. Numbers appeal because they offer order, recognition, and an easy way to communicate identity. But when destinations are experienced primarily as milestones, tourism risks becoming more about proving than experiencing.
How can destinations encourage deeper engagement, not just checklist visits? How can social media be used to highlight cultural depth instead of mere accumulation?
Numbers appeal because they offer order, recognition, and an easy way to communicate identity.
Some emerging approaches, such as digital detox offerings, slow travel initiatives, or community-led storytelling, try to counterbalance the pressures of performative travel. Ultimately, country-counting highlights a central tension in contemporary travel: the desire to explore and the desire to be seen exploring. Understanding this tension is crucial for developing tourism practices that support not only mobility, but also cultural respect, sustainability, and genuine connection.
Why all this matters?
At its heart, this research is about more than travel. It is about how we define ourselves in a digital age. Country-counting reflects a broader cultural shift toward experience-based status seeking and the quantification of personal achievements. It captures both the empowering and the stressful sides of modern self-presentation. Travel can still be a source of learning, growth, and genuine connection. But in an era of constant sharing and comparison, it can also become another arena for competition.
Country-counting reflects a broader cultural shift toward experience-based status seeking and the quantification of personal achievements.
Understanding these dynamics is not about judging travellers. It is about recognising the complex motivations that shape our behaviour and fostering greater awareness of how we travel, share, and construct our identities. Ultimately, whether one is indifferent to numbers or chasing that three-digit country count, the most meaningful travel experiences are rarely the ones we can count.
The most profound journeys have always been about transformation, not just transportation. They are remembered for the growth they inspire, the connections they foster, and the experiences that can not be captured in numbers, or on a screen.
Björklund, S. (2021). HUOLTA, HÄPEÄÄ JA HUOLENPITOA: Ympäristötunteet nuorten matkailijoiden kerronnallisissa identiteeteissä. [Pro gradu -tutkielma, Lapin yliopisto]. Lauda. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021062139317
Kostopoulos, I., Magrizos, S., & Harris, L. C. (2023). Tourists as Experience Collectors: A New Travelling Mind-Set. Leisure Sciences, 47(6), 1290-1310. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2023.2206401
Thurnell-Read, T. (2017). ‘What’s on your Bucket List?’: Tourism, identity and imperative experiential discourse. Annals of Tourism Research, 67, 58-66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.08.003
Emma Felin holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences, specialising in Tourism, Culture and International Management, from the University of Lapland. With a background in Customer Relationship Management, Events, and Communication (for NGOs), her interests focus on sustainable development, human-centred experiences, and the meaningful connections between people, places, and cultures.
Anna-Emilia Haapakoski is a University Teacher of Tourism research in the University of Lapland. Her doctoral research in the Faculty of Social Sciences explores slowness as resistance. In the years 2026-2029 she will be working in a Biodiversa+ funded research project Ecological Pilgrimage: Engaging with biodiversity through walking interventions.
Slow travel against the accelerating modern metrics
Engaging in leisure activities like bucket list travel and country counting travel is a sign of the times. Keeping scores of the most popular attractions and one’s travelled countries on social media platforms are novel tourism practices. However, they share connotations with old travel discourses, at least in the eyes of a tourism researcher. Nowadays, platforms such as NomadMania bring global visibility and social capital to the cosmopolitan traveler and their achievements. In a similar vein, the early tales of voyages around the world gathered significant attention to conquest.
In addition to adding exotic destinations to a traveler’s personal portfolio, what “new” country-counting reveals about modern travel culture, is indeed the use of numbers that have come to present, shape and view who we are as individuals. In the context of tourism, Felin explores how counting countries becomes a part of identity, how sharing those numbers helps travelers gain recognition from others, and how the practice of counting grows into a numeric marker of status within the tourism landscape.
The use of numbers to define identity is indeed common, for example when it comes to age, weight, mileage that one is able to run, at what pace, and so on. Numbers can be useful for the goals of categorizing and improving performance. They also offer a simple format of presentation and quick gratification. But do these numeric details fulfill us? Or might the culture of constant calculations even inhibit us from accessing the depths of experience? In the light of my research with slowness, I suggest caution. Performance-based metrics are familiar from work life, too. However optimal for their purpose of increasing production efficiency, they have not seemed promising in increasing the quality of experience among employees. Quite the contrary, they have led to an accelerating pace of work, narrowed autonomy and even burn-outs by normalizing inhumane pace, and leaving little to no room for in-depth encounters.
Maybe the risks are not as severe in leisure as in the world of business where time is money. However, I might still suggest that travelers, too, recall the old saying “it’s not about the destination but about the journey” as it holds a lot of meaning. In travel, this counter-cultural narrative of slowing down to “smell the roses” is the most visibly articulated by the supporters of slow travel. This approach emphasizing journeying instead of focusing on the outcomes stands in stark contrast to modern tourism, which feels more like a scavenger hunt.
In a time where travelers rush from one attraction to another, more concerned with documenting their presence than being present, slow travel suggests seizing the moment. It is noteworthy, that practicing slowness in the fast world might even face resistance as it contradicts the system based on external validation and accomplishment and aims to reclaim inner pleasure and serendipity.
Why are more travellers tracking how many countries they have visited, and proudly sharing the number online? A recent master’s thesis by Emma Felin shows that this trend is far more than a niche hobby. It offers a window into how travel, identity, and social media intertwine in today’s tourism culture.
In tourism today, people don’t just travel – they show they travel. Over the last decade, a growing number of travellers have begun engaging in a phenomenon called country counting. This entails keeping track of how many countries they have visited, sometimes even listing the exact number in their social media bios. Platforms like NomadMania, which rank travellers by country counts, have brought global visibility to the trend.
To understand what country-counting reveals about modern travel culture, in my thesis, I investigated how travellers use these numbers to shape and view who they are. It explores how counting countries becomes part of identity, how sharing those numbers helps travellers gain recognition from others, and how the practice can grow into a visible marker of status within today’s tourism landscape. These questions help explain why the phenomenon resonates so strongly, and what it tells us about the ways people present themselves through travel in a highly connected world.
Beyond numbers: why counting matters
Counting countries may begin as a simple record of places visited, but for many it becomes deeply personal. A new destination is not just a dot on the map, it can symbolise courage, adaptability, or determination. For some participants, it represents proof of discipline and achievement. For others, it is a way to make sense of their experiences and growth.
Importantly, the record is rarely kept private. Country counts are shared in conversations and digital spaces, especially on social media, where they function as achievements on display. A country list or a colour-coded map becomes part of one’s public image. Through this act, travel transforms from a private experience into a social statement, one that signals who we are and what we value.
A cycle of identity-building
The interviews I conducted for my thesis revealed that country-counting is not a single act but part of a repeating cycle through which travellers shape, express, and reinforce their sense of self. Rather than forming all at once, identity is built in stages that loop back into each other, a process that continues with every new journey.
It begins with how travellers see themselves. Many interviewees described themselves as adventurous, curious, or determined. Travel becomes a stage on which to express these qualities, and the number of countries visited offers a simple, concrete way to make these characteristics visible.
As travellers move through the world, emotions and experiences strengthen their self-image. Confidence gained from navigating new environments, pride in reaching a challenging destination, or gratitude for meaningful encounters all reinforce who they believe themselves to be.
Sharing these stories, whether through conversations, photos, or social media posts, becomes the next step in the cycle. Here, travel turns into a performed identity. By choosing what to show and how to frame it, travellers present a version of themselves to others. This stage is both expressive and strategic: it is about reliving the experience (emotions), but also about telling others something about oneself. As one interviewee explained, sharing travel content is at once a personal reflection and a performance for an audience.
Feedback from others; likes, comments, admiration, or simply the sense of being seen, forms an important part of the loop. Recognition can strengthen the identity being performed, making travellers feel more confident, more worldly, or more like the person they want to be. At the same time, the expectation of recognition can create pressure to maintain a certain image or pace of travel.
Finally, this feedback often helps shape future travel goals. Several interviewees said that when planning their next trip, they looked for destinations that would feel new, different, or meaningful, and sometimes, ones that would look good or add value to their country count. In this way, identity-building does not stop after a journey. Rather, it actively influences where travellers go next, what they prioritise, and what they hope to express.
Travel as performance
To understand these dynamics, I analysed interviewees’ stories through sociologist Erving Goffman’s performance theory, which views everyday life as a series of roles and stages. This approach helped reveal how travel today is not only something we do, but something we show. On the front stage, travellers perform for an audience, showcasing curated stories, milestone counts, and deliberated photos. Behind the scenes, however, they may experience doubts, exhaustion, or even anxiety about keeping up appearances.
This does not make the performance false. Rather, it illustrates that travel today is both lived and staged: we genuinely feel joy, pride, and wonder, but we also shape those emotions into public narratives that signal value, identity, and status.
The role of social media is not just to document this behaviour; it actively shapes and amplifies the practice. In combining travel with the logic of collecting, platforms turn experiences into a form of symbolic capital, a way to communicate worldliness, adventurousness, and competence. In a culture that celebrates productivity and achievement, a carefully curated travel feed becomes a kind of social currency. Problems arise when performance overshadows experience. When the goal shifts from the genuine engagement with places and cultures to collecting proof of being there, the depth of travel can be lost.
Beyond checklist tourism
One of the most important insights from the study is that collection and connection are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to visit many countries while still travelling mindfully and respectfully. The travel industry has an important role in promoting experiences that prioritise cultural depth over accumulation, whether through marketing that highlights cultural immersion or by designing opportunities that encourage presence rather than performance. At the same time, travellers themselves also have a role to play: to reflect critically on how and why they travel, and to stay aware of the social dynamics that influence their choices.
What this means for tourism
Country-counting is not just an individual habit; it reflects wider shifts in tourism culture. Numbers appeal because they offer order, recognition, and an easy way to communicate identity. But when destinations are experienced primarily as milestones, tourism risks becoming more about proving than experiencing.
How can destinations encourage deeper engagement, not just checklist visits? How can social media be used to highlight cultural depth instead of mere accumulation?
Some emerging approaches, such as digital detox offerings, slow travel initiatives, or community-led storytelling, try to counterbalance the pressures of performative travel. Ultimately, country-counting highlights a central tension in contemporary travel: the desire to explore and the desire to be seen exploring. Understanding this tension is crucial for developing tourism practices that support not only mobility, but also cultural respect, sustainability, and genuine connection.
Why all this matters?
At its heart, this research is about more than travel. It is about how we define ourselves in a digital age. Country-counting reflects a broader cultural shift toward experience-based status seeking and the quantification of personal achievements. It captures both the empowering and the stressful sides of modern self-presentation. Travel can still be a source of learning, growth, and genuine connection. But in an era of constant sharing and comparison, it can also become another arena for competition.
Understanding these dynamics is not about judging travellers. It is about recognising the complex motivations that shape our behaviour and fostering greater awareness of how we travel, share, and construct our identities. Ultimately, whether one is indifferent to numbers or chasing that three-digit country count, the most meaningful travel experiences are rarely the ones we can count.
The most profound journeys have always been about transformation, not just transportation. They are remembered for the growth they inspire, the connections they foster, and the experiences that can not be captured in numbers, or on a screen.
EMMA FELIN
Header photo: Leah Newhouse/Pexels
Suggested readings
Björklund, S. (2021). HUOLTA, HÄPEÄÄ JA HUOLENPITOA: Ympäristötunteet nuorten matkailijoiden kerronnallisissa identiteeteissä. [Pro gradu -tutkielma, Lapin yliopisto]. Lauda. https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021062139317
Kostopoulos, I., Magrizos, S., & Harris, L. C. (2023). Tourists as Experience Collectors: A New Travelling Mind-Set. Leisure Sciences, 47(6), 1290-1310. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2023.2206401
Thurnell-Read, T. (2017). ‘What’s on your Bucket List?’: Tourism, identity and imperative experiential discourse. Annals of Tourism Research, 67, 58-66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.08.003
Travelers’ Century Club: https://travelerscenturyclub.org/about/
EMMA FELIN
Emma Felin holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences, specialising in Tourism, Culture and International Management, from the University of Lapland. With a background in Customer Relationship Management, Events, and Communication (for NGOs), her interests focus on sustainable development, human-centred experiences, and the meaningful connections between people, places, and cultures.
READ THE COMMENTARY
ANNA-EMILIA HAAPAKOSKI
Anna-Emilia Haapakoski is a University Teacher of Tourism research in the University of Lapland. Her doctoral research in the Faculty of Social Sciences explores slowness as resistance. In the years 2026-2029 she will be working in a Biodiversa+ funded research project Ecological Pilgrimage: Engaging with biodiversity through walking interventions.
Slow travel against the accelerating modern metrics
Engaging in leisure activities like bucket list travel and country counting travel is a sign of the times. Keeping scores of the most popular attractions and one’s travelled countries on social media platforms are novel tourism practices. However, they share connotations with old travel discourses, at least in the eyes of a tourism researcher. Nowadays, platforms such as NomadMania bring global visibility and social capital to the cosmopolitan traveler and their achievements. In a similar vein, the early tales of voyages around the world gathered significant attention to conquest.
In addition to adding exotic destinations to a traveler’s personal portfolio, what “new” country-counting reveals about modern travel culture, is indeed the use of numbers that have come to present, shape and view who we are as individuals. In the context of tourism, Felin explores how counting countries becomes a part of identity, how sharing those numbers helps travelers gain recognition from others, and how the practice of counting grows into a numeric marker of status within the tourism landscape.
The use of numbers to define identity is indeed common, for example when it comes to age, weight, mileage that one is able to run, at what pace, and so on. Numbers can be useful for the goals of categorizing and improving performance. They also offer a simple format of presentation and quick gratification. But do these numeric details fulfill us? Or might the culture of constant calculations even inhibit us from accessing the depths of experience? In the light of my research with slowness, I suggest caution. Performance-based metrics are familiar from work life, too. However optimal for their purpose of increasing production efficiency, they have not seemed promising in increasing the quality of experience among employees. Quite the contrary, they have led to an accelerating pace of work, narrowed autonomy and even burn-outs by normalizing inhumane pace, and leaving little to no room for in-depth encounters.
Maybe the risks are not as severe in leisure as in the world of business where time is money. However, I might still suggest that travelers, too, recall the old saying “it’s not about the destination but about the journey” as it holds a lot of meaning. In travel, this counter-cultural narrative of slowing down to “smell the roses” is the most visibly articulated by the supporters of slow travel. This approach emphasizing journeying instead of focusing on the outcomes stands in stark contrast to modern tourism, which feels more like a scavenger hunt.
In a time where travelers rush from one attraction to another, more concerned with documenting their presence than being present, slow travel suggests seizing the moment. It is noteworthy, that practicing slowness in the fast world might even face resistance as it contradicts the system based on external validation and accomplishment and aims to reclaim inner pleasure and serendipity.
ANNA-EMILIA HAAPAKOSKI
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