Family & Memories
Travel Tips From Your Family, Not the Algorithm
When people plan a trip today, they rarely ask their family first. They ask the feed. That’s where you find the viewpoint for the striking photo and the sandwich that is supposedly the best in town. This article asks why a look at your own family tree might be worth more – and why that look becomes more rewarding with every generation.
When everyone gets the same tip
Social media has changed how we discover places. What shows up in many feeds draws many people, often at the same time and often for the same shot. Those who arrive frequently find a queue in front of the photo spot, prices that have adjusted to the crowds, and an experience that feels more like ticking a box than discovering something.
That doesn’t mean these tips are bad. Many people recommend places out of real enthusiasm. But the platforms that spread recommendations mostly reward what stands out. A place doesn’t have to be good to spread fast – often it just has to look good. Sometimes a recommendation is also backed by a partnership, an invitation or the understandable wish for reach. From the outside, that’s hard to tell apart.
The most honest recommendation has no reach
There are people who recommend places without gaining anything from it: your family. Your aunt earns no commission when you visit the little inn she has been talking about for years. Your grandfather gains no followers when he describes the beach where he camped as a young man.
Such recommendations aren’t objective. They’re colored by memories, by the people someone traveled with back then, sometimes by nostalgia. But that is exactly what makes them valuable. They don’t just tell you where something is, but why it meant something to someone. And they come from people whose taste you know and whose intentions you can judge.
More travel than ever before
Add to that a development that’s easy to overlook. According to the United Nations’ tourism agency (UN Tourism, formerly UNWTO), there were around 25 million international tourist arrivals worldwide in 1950. By 1980 there were 278 million, and by 2000 already 674 million. For 2025, UN Tourism estimates around 1.52 billion – roughly sixty times as many as in 1950.
These figures count trips, not people: anyone who travels abroad twice is counted twice. And the world’s population has grown over the same period. Still, the trend is clear, and it keeps pointing upward.
Place these numbers next to a family tree and an interesting picture emerges. Many grandparents of today’s thirty- and forty-somethings grew up at a time when a trip abroad was something special. Their children traveled considerably more, and the grandchildren often more still. It’s quite possible that in many families, today’s generation has seen more of the world than any generation before. And almost wherever you go, the chance that someone in your family has already been there has rarely been higher.
The problem: this knowledge is scattered
But that knowledge doesn’t help much if nobody records it. It sits in photo albums, in slide boxes, on old phones and in stories told at family gatherings and then forgotten again. Many people know their grandparents’ trip to the coast only as a vague “we went there once.” Where exactly, in which year, what there was to see – it fades.
On top of that, people often don’t ask. Before a trip, it’s easier to open an app than to call your aunt. And many simply don’t know that someone in their own family has been to exactly that place.
A family memory for places
This is where Perrenix comes in. In the app, you answer questions about your life, and you can save a photo and a place with an answer. In the “Ancestors” section, you record family history, upload old photos and documents, and add a place to those entries too. You can build your family tree on your own or together with your family, whom you invite.
In a shared family tree, this becomes an overview: “Family places.” If you want, you share a place with your family, along with the year and, if you like, the photo. That way everyone can see where the family has been, who was there and when. If you search for a city or a country before a trip, you can see at a glance whether someone in your family tree has already been there. The list is sorted by how often your family has been somewhere, not by likes.
What isn’t shared is your written text. It stays private until it is released to your Trust Circle – the people you choose yourself, who are meant to get access to your memories one day. Whether your answers also become visible to other Perrenix users is up to you as well: not at all, later, or right away.
This is deliberate. The place is the prompt; the story behind it is worth a conversation. If you see that your mother was in the city you’re about to visit thirty years ago, you have a good reason to call her. Maybe you’ll get a tip for a café that’s still around. Maybe a story you’ve never heard.
A network made only of people you trust
In a way, this is a social network too. Just one without reach, without followers and without the pressure for a place to look good in order to be seen. The community is your family tree: people whose taste you know and who aren’t trying to sell you anything.
And it has value beyond your next trip. Every shared place is a small piece of family history. Anyone scrolling through this overview in twenty years won’t just see destinations, but chapters of a life: the first big trip after school, the grandparents’ honeymoon, the summer when the kids were still small. Maybe then you won’t go to the place everyone is posting right now, but to the one where your grandmother was once happy.
Three questions to think further
- Which place would you recommend to your family – and why that one?
- Do you know where your grandparents traveled when they were your age?
- Which tip from your family have you never tried?
Sources
- UN Tourism (then UNWTO): “UNWTO Tourism Highlights, 2017 Edition” (2017) – international arrivals in 1950, 1980 and 2000
- UN Tourism: “World Tourism Barometer”, January 2026 edition – estimate for 2025 (1.52 billion international arrivals)