“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s OK. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” — Anthony Bourdain
I’ve been building a travel app for the better part of a year now, which means I’ve spent an unreasonable number of hours arguing with myself about visa policy, staring at spreadsheets until my eyes bleed, and — somewhere in between — thinking about Anthony Bourdain more than is probably normal for a woman who never met the man.
He was far from perfect. He’d be the first to tell you that. But he did something almost nobody else in travel media has managed to pull off: he made an entire generation fall in love with the discomfort of travel, not just the highlight reel.
That’s rare. Most travel content is a lie by omission. It’s the sunset, never the twelve-hour layover that led to it. It’s the infinity pool, never the stomach bug you got from the street food that was, ironically, the best meal of the trip. Bourdain refused to play that game. He’d sit on a plastic stool in an alley eating something that would send a Yelp reviewer into cardiac arrest, and he’d tell you honestly: this might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten, and also, I might die tonight. Both things were true. He let them both be true.
Here’s the lesson: sanitized travel isn’t travel. It’s set dressing.
The App That Almost Lied To You
When I started building my app, I had a choice to make, and it’s the same choice every travel product eventually has to make: do I sell people the fantasy, or do I tell them the truth?
The fantasy is easier. The fantasy converts better. Nobody screenshots a border-crossing advisory and posts it to their story with a little palm tree emoji. But the fantasy is also how people end up stranded at a checkpoint with the wrong visa, or blindsided by a health advisory nobody bothered to mention, or budgeting like the trip is going to cost what the influencer said it cost (it will not; the influencer is lying to you, or worse, sponsored).
So instead I built the annoying version. The one that tells you the requirement you don’t want to hear. The one that flags the advisory instead of burying it. The one that treats you like an adult who can handle a full picture, not a tourist who needs to be coddled into a purchase. It’s less pretty. It is, I hope, more honest — which is the whole Bourdain thesis in a sentence.
You Are Going to Get Your Heart Broken, and That’s the Point
The line in that quote that actually stops me every time is “sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart.” Not “sometimes it’s inconvenient.” Not “sometimes the wifi is bad.” Heartbreak.
That’s not a bug in travel. That’s the entire product. If a place doesn’t have the power to wreck you a little — to make you confront how small your worldview was, how wrong you were about a country, a food, a stranger, yourself — then you didn’t actually go anywhere. You just moved your body to a new background and took the same photos you always take.
I think about this every time I’m tempted to make Borderly nicer than it needs to be. Nicer isn’t the goal. Useful is the goal. True is the goal. The app that tells you the visa office is a bureaucratic nightmare and you should bring snacks and patience is doing you a bigger favor than the app that just shows you a pretty beach and calls it a day.
Leave Something Good Behind
The most Bourdain part of that quote isn’t even about the traveler. It’s the last line: “hopefully, you leave something good behind.” Not a footprint. Not a selfie. Something good.
That’s the part travel apps almost never talk about, because it doesn’t sell subscriptions. Nobody’s writing ad copy about “leave the place better than you found it.” But it’s the whole point, isn’t it? You’re not just extracting an experience from a country like it’s a resource. You’re supposed to be leaving something too — respect, curiosity, money that goes to the people who actually live there instead of the megaresort that flew it out.
I’m one woman who’s dragged a backpack through nearly 60 countries at this point, and if there’s one thing that trip after trip has hammered into me, it’s that the best travel experiences were never the comfortable ones. They were the ones that scared me a little. The ones I got wrong. The ones I had to apologize for. Bourdain understood that better than almost anyone with a camera crew ever has, and it’s the standard I keep trying to hold myself to while I build something that’s supposed to help other people go do the same thing.
He didn’t sugarcoat it. I’m trying not to either.
(If you haven’t seen it, watch Roadrunner on Max. It’s not a comfortable watch. Which, fittingly, is exactly the point.)
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