The Underrated Lie

What "Underrated" Actually Means

Let's start with the boring part: the dictionary.

Merriam-Webster defines underrated as rated or valued too low. Oxford says basically the same thing. So to call something underrated, you'd logically need a few things:

• A clear rating baseline.
• A measurable consensus.
• Evidence that the current evaluation is systematically too low.

In other words, you'd need a rating system. And you'd need proof that the system got it wrong.

Now, think about where this actually works. Film has IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. Restaurants have Michelin stars and Google reviews. Hotels have literal star ratings. You can look at those numbers and argue, with data, that something was rated too low.

But travel destinations? There is no global rating system for places. There's no Rotten Tomatoes for countries. There's no Michelin Guide for coastlines. So when a blogger writes Albania is underrated, who exactly rated it too low? Rated by whom? Compared to what? On which scale?

That's the first crack. And it's a big one.

"Underrated" Places That Aren't

Alright, let's get into the numbers. Because this is where it gets kinda embarrassing for the travel internet.

I picked a handful of places that regularly appear in underrated destination lists and looked at what the actual data says.

Albania. Oh, Albania. The darling of every underrated listicle since about 2018. Lonely Planet ranked Albania the number one destination to visit back in 2011. The New York Times named it number four among 52 places to visit in 2014. In 2015, Albania welcomed 4.1 million foreign tourists. By 2024, that number had exploded to 11.7 million. Officials expect 15 million by the end of 2025. That's nearly quadruple the country's population. If Albania is hiding, it's doing the worst job in recorded history.

Georgia. Another favorite of the hidden gem crowd. In 2024, Georgia recorded 5.1 million international tourist visits, an all time record and a 9% increase over 2023. Total international travelers (including day trippers) hit 7.37 million. Revenue from international tourism reached 4.1 billion USD in 2023 alone. This is a country with a population of 3.7 million. That's basically two visiting tourists for every Georgian. The word hidden has truly fallen on hard times.

Slovenia. In 2023, Slovenia recorded 6.2 million tourist arrivals and over 16.1 million overnight stays, surpassing even the pre-pandemic record of 2019. In the first nine months of 2024, 4.3 million foreign tourists visited, a 7.2% increase year over year. The OECD confirmed that Slovenia reached 99% of pre-pandemic international visitor levels in 2023. Underrated is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Porto. In 2023, Porto recorded 5.9 million overnight stays, a significant jump from 4.8 million in 2022. By November 2024, the Porto and North region had welcomed nearly 7 million guests. Porto won the World Travel Award for World's Leading City Destination in 2022. The city has 10.55 tourists per inhabitant. I could keep going. I'll spare you, because we still have psychology, sociology, and a Nobel laureate to get through.

Now let's put one of these in perspective. You know how many visitors Iceland got in 2012? 646,921. Albania blew past that years ago. So when someone writes that Albania is a hidden gem, they're describing a place that gets more annual visitors than Iceland did during the early stages of its own tourism explosion.

And the broader context makes this even more absurd. Globally, 1.47 billion international tourists traveled in 2024, fully recovering to pre-pandemic levels. EU tourism topped 3 billion nights that same year, a record. Tourism is not shrinking. It is bigger than it has ever been. Calling well-documented, heavily visited destinations underrated in this context isn't analysis. It's fiction.

The Psychology Behind the Word

Okay, so why does underrated stick? Why does it feel so satisfying to use?

Because it's not really about the destination. It's about you.

Let's start with scarcity bias, one of the most well-documented principles in behavioral psychology. Robert Cialdini, in his landmark work Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, identified scarcity as one of six core principles of persuasion. The idea is straightforward: people want more of what they can have less of. When something is perceived as rare, its subjective value skyrockets. The same principle applies to knowledge. Cialdini found that when wholesale beef buyers were told that a supply shortage was coming, they doubled their orders. When they were told that the information itself was exclusive, that nobody else had been warned, orders jumped by 600%.

Sound familiar? Underrated works the exact same way. It signals: this information is scarce. Most people don't know this. You're getting exclusive insider knowledge.

But there's something deeper going on, too. Research on the need for uniqueness shows that people actively seek to distinguish themselves from the mass. A 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that consumers perceive supply-based scarce products as significantly more unique than demand-based ones, and that this perception of uniqueness drives purchase intention, especially for people with a high need for self-distinctiveness. The psychologists Snyder and Fromkin developed an entire theory around this: people seek to establish and maintain a sense of moderate self-distinctiveness through their consumption choices.

Travel works the same way. Visiting a place nobody knows about isn't just a trip. It's a signal. It says: I see value where the masses don't. I'm more discerning than the average tourist.

This is where Pierre Bourdieu comes in. Bourdieu, the French sociologist, argued in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste that cultural preferences are never neutral. Taste, he wrote, is a form of social positioning. What you consume, how you consume it, and what you claim to value all function as markers of social class. Bourdieu called this cultural capital, the non-financial assets like knowledge, skills, and aesthetic sensibilities that signal your position in the social hierarchy.

In Bourdieu's framework, cultural capital operates partly through what he called habitus, deeply internalized dispositions that guide behavior without conscious thought. Your taste in travel, the places you go, how you talk about them, the disdain you show for touristy spots, all of that is habitus in action. It's not just preference. It's performance.

So when a travel blogger writes this place is so underrated, they're not really making an evaluative claim about the destination. They're performing cultural capital. They're saying: my taste is refined enough to see what others can't. And that, according to Bourdieu, is always about power and positioning.

There's also a simpler cognitive bias at play here, something I'd call the discovery effect. It doesn't have a formal name in the literature, but it's closely related to what behavioral economists call the IKEA effect, the tendency for people to overvalue things they had a hand in creating or discovering. When you find a place that feels personal, that wasn't on the front page of every travel blog, you assign it more value than it objectively warrants. Not because the place is actually better. But because the discovery feels like it belongs to you.

The Attention Economy Angle

Now let's zoom out and look at the system.

Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist, wrote in 1971 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. That single sentence basically predicted the entire internet. Simon argued that as information becomes abundant, the scarce resource isn't data. It's attention.

Today, we live in what media theorists call the attention economy, a system where the platforms, the algorithms, and the content creators are all competing for the same finite resource: your eyeballs. And in that system, certain types of content win.

Algorithms reward novelty, controversy, and reframing. Underrated checks all three boxes. It implies the crowd is wrong (controversy), offers a fresh take (novelty), and repackages a known destination as unknown (reframing). It is, in the most precise sense of the word, clickbait.

Research confirms this. A study analyzing over 4,400 Facebook posts found that specific headline features, including unusual framing and common clickbait phrases, significantly increase user interaction. Headlines containing unexpected elements have been shown to increase click-through rates by 21%, according to research published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Another study found that headlines with emotive words and numbers generate 5 to 53 percentage points more engagement than headlines without those features.

Underrated is engineered for engagement. It triggers curiosity (what am I missing?), appeals to ego (I'm about to learn something most people don't know), and promises insider status. It's not a description. It's a hook.

And here's where it gets a bit dark. Researcher James Williams, drawing on Simon's work, has argued that the real risk of the attention economy isn't that your attention gets used up. It's that you lose control over your own attentional processes. Tristan Harris, the former Google design ethicist, called it a race to the bottom of the brainstem. The platforms optimize for engagement, not accuracy. And content creators, consciously or not, optimize for what the platforms reward.

So underrated persists not because it's true. It persists because it works. The algorithm doesn't care whether Albania actually has 11.7 million visitors. The algorithm cares whether you click.

The Inflation Problem

Here's the sharp punch, and I think you already know where this is going.

If everything is underrated, nothing is.

Once a destination appears in 50 blog posts, 200 YouTube videos, and 10 separate Top 10 Underrated Places lists, it is, by any reasonable definition, no longer underrated. The word has eaten itself.

Think about it. The hashtag #hiddengem has been used millions of times on Instagram. That's not a hidden gem. That's a marketing category. The hashtag #wanderlust has over 132 million posts. Travel-related tags like #travelgram have 144 million. There is nothing hidden about any of this.

You wanna know what a secret beach looks like in 2026? It has a parking lot, a cafe, three Airbnb listings within walking distance, a TikTok with 2 million views explaining how to get there, and a German couple who arrived at 6 a.m. to throw a towel on the best sun lounger. The word secret has become a genre, not a fact.

This is semantic inflation. The same thing that happened to artisanal, authentic, and curated is happening to underrated. Each time the word gets used, it loses a little more meaning, until eventually it means nothing at all except: I am recommending this thing.

And the data backs this up. The places most frequently called underrated are, overwhelmingly, places that are already heavily documented, already receiving millions of visitors, and already featured in major guidebooks. Lonely Planet has been publishing travel guides since 1973. Fodor's published its first guidebook in 1936. Frommer's has been around since the 1950s. If a place has been in Lonely Planet for 15 years, has a UNESCO listing, an international airport, and a tourism board with a marketing budget, calling it underrated is not an observation. It's an absurdity.

The Patronizing Layer

One more thing. This part is less fun than the rest, sorry in advance.

Calling a place underrated can be mildly patronizing.

Think about what the word implies:

• Locals failed to appreciate it.
• Other travelers failed to notice it.
• Only the author recognizes its true value.

That framing subtly positions the writer as culturally superior. The destination and its people become backdrop. The discovery belongs to the blogger. And the millions of people who already live there, visit there, celebrate there? Their experience doesn't count as a rating.

This connects back to Bourdieu. Cultural capital, he argued, isn't just about what you know. It's about the power to define what counts as valuable. When a Western travel blogger declares that Tirana or Tbilisi is underrated, they're implicitly asserting the authority to evaluate, and the assumption that the place was waiting to be evaluated by someone like them.

Research on social media self-presentation supports this. A study in BMC Psychology found that frequent social media exposure drives upward social comparison and increases the desire for online self-presentation. Another study confirmed that self-presentation on social media significantly predicts a preference for experiential consumption like travel. In other words, the way people talk about travel online isn't neutral. It's performance, shaped by the need to signal status, taste, and cultural access.

I'm not saying everyone who uses the word is a snob. Most aren't. But the structure of the word itself carries that baggage, and it's worth being honest about it.

Use Better Language

Look, I'm not here to just tear stuff down without offering something constructive. So here's a practical alternative.

If you're a travel writer and you wanna describe a place that deserves more international attention, you have options. Lots of them. And they're all more honest than underrated.

These phrases are actually descriptive. They tell the reader something specific instead of just performing insider knowledge. Less internationally known acknowledges that locals and regional travelers have been enjoying the place for years. Low foreign visitor share gives you data. Emerging destination signals trajectory without pretending nobody's heard of it.

Language matters. If your whole job is describing places, doing it accurately seems like a reasonable starting point.