How to Create a Travel Diary on Instagram

Have you ever read someone’s Instagram travel diary? If you have, you can probably remember the wanderlust welling up in your soul and an inexplicable longing to travel to faraway lands taking over.

This is exactly what a travel diary is supposed to do. Its words should evoke mental pictures of exotic locales, while its images stir the spirit.

If you love travelling and social media, this is a concept you should take to heart. Creating a travel diary means you can share the places you love the most in the world with your online community. And, in turn, you can inspire even more people to start their own travel diaries.

So, how do you get started? Keep reading to find out!

Transfer Your 90s Scrapbook to Instagram

If you’ve been traveling for many years, chances are you have a very 90s (or at least early 00s) scrapbook. Now is the time to transfer those well-worn pages to Instagram.

Looking through your paper scrapbook, you’ll rediscover how you chronicled your travel experiences by writing witty captions in the margins and adding funny stickers to happy photos.

You can recreate this on Instagram as a nostalgic intro to your modern online travel diary. Take photos of each page and create collages or carousels for Instagram.

Depict the emotions you felt on each journey using captions and emojis. Detail the personal growth you experienced visiting new and exciting destinations. Then, go out there and explore some more.

Getting Started on Your Digital Scrapbook

Whether you call it a travel diary or a digital scrapbook, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is how you plan on sharing new visuals and experiences. You are not the first or last person to create a travel diary on Instagram, so yours has to strike a different chord.

For instance, if you see a lot of beach-traveling diary creators on your feed, you may want to go the other way and start a travel diary about mountain expeditions.

If there are loads of Las Vegas posts, you may want to explore the least glitzy places. The idea behind a travel diary is to introduce your followers to places they’ve never seen or possibly heard of before. And doing it in such a way that your audience feels like a part of the entire experience.

Key Elements of an Instagram Travel Diary

While the tone and style of your visuals are up to you, there are some factors you must incorporate into your diary. These include the following:

Every Visual Must Tell a Story

Remember your childhood photo album with the cut-off heads and the weird shots of Lady Liberty that make it look like she’s leaning over into the ocean?

Those may be nostalgic for you and your family, but photos like this don’t tell a good story on Instagram. This means you must capture high-quality images and videos at every destination.

Sure, you can goof off a bit and go for a smiling selfie reel but, generally speaking, you need to try and reproduce the natural beauty of your destination using your camera.

The essence of local cultures and your raw emotion at seeing a mind-blowing natural attraction for the first time must filter through to your images and your Instagram audience.

Every Story Must Have a Caption

Yes, a picture does speak a thousand words, but without a caption, your followers may not know whether you’re at Tianmen Mountain or the movie set of Skull Island.

Captions provide instant context to travel diary photos and videos. They’re great for sharing personal anecdotes in your diary, or to create a how-to for first-time travelers.

You can use funny captions to detail your traveler’s experience in a weird and wonderful location or transform a series of similar images into a compelling storyline.

Don’t Fake Anything

Look, if you’re not really at the Grand Canyon, don’t try and fool people with Photoshop or AI. The core of a travel diary is authentic experiences.

If you want to connect with your followers on Instagram, you must showcase only actual travels. There is so much you can do with a travel diary, things you won’t be able to accomplish when you don’t travel.

You can visit incredible monuments or statues in the US or around the world and chronicle your perspective. Or you could hike the most famous trail in a handful of countries and compare the experiences in your travel diary.

Your insights into these destinations will get the conversation going on your Instagram feed and make your diary a success.

Interact With Your Followers

Traveling and snapping great photos or recording memorable videos is only half the job done. Once you post your travels on Instagram, your followers will react by commenting or asking questions. If you ignore this, your online travel diary will fall flat.

To prevent this from happening, be open to answering these questions and being interested in what your audience has to say.

Instagram has always been a two-way street. Without content creators, users would have nothing to look at. Without followers, creators would have no one to create awe-inspiring content for.

Benefits of Creating an Instagram Travel Diary

The benefits of an Instagram travel diary are numerous. You get to preserve the most incredible travel memories while sharing your once-in-a-lifetime experiences with like-minded travelers on Instagram.

Also, a travel diary is a lot like a conventional diary. If you’ve been through some tough times, the combination of travel and writing about it can help you overcome personal obstacles.

Moreover, it is an excellent creative outlet if you’re an artist by heart or trade. It allows you to tell stories in various ways while showcasing your artistic talents.

Enjoy Your Journey and Write About It In your Travel Diary

So, now that you’ve been inspired, start planning your next trip. And, while you’re at it, create an itinerary that allows for plenty of content and captions. Use Instagram’s features like Stories, Highlights, Live Videos, and Reels to enhance your storytelling.

But, most importantly of all, embrace the wonder that travel brings to the soul. Welcome the spontaneity and impulsivity that global destinations inevitably offer. Then, write about it for the world to see on Instagram.