The 48-hour problem with travel influencers
Big travel accounts have a structural problem: they fly in, shoot for two days, and fly out. In 48 hours you can photograph a city; you cannot know it. So their itineraries converge on the same five photogenic places — the swing, the rooftop, the pastel street — and the caption says “hidden gem” about a café with a thirty-minute queue of people holding the same phone.
Local Instagram accounts for travel tips are the opposite bet. Someone posting one city every week for three years has eaten the bad meals for you, noticed when the good bakery changed owners, and has neighbours in the comments keeping them honest. They recommend with a reputation attached. That difference — depth over reach — is the third pillar of finding hidden gems in any city, and it's the one most travellers skip.
How to find local Instagram accounts for any city
They're easy to find once you know the naming patterns. Fifteen minutes before a trip:
- Search the handle patterns: city + “food”, “eats” or “secret” — think along the lines of “berlinfood” or “lisboneats”. Nearly every city has two or three of these run by residents.
- Search hashtags in the local language, not English. The accounts posting under the local-language food tags are posting for locals, which is the audience you want to eavesdrop on.
- Work backwards from one good restaurant. Open the profile of a place you already trust and see which accounts it reposts or tags — local food pages cluster together.
- Check the comments of any viral post about the city. The person correcting details (“it moved last year”, “go before noon”) is often exactly the account you're looking for.
Vet the account in two minutes
Not every city-named account is worth following; some are just influencer feeds with a local costume. Before you trust one, scroll for two minutes and check:
- One city, long history. Two or more years of posts about the same place beats any follower count.
- Mixed price points. A real local eats €4 sandwiches and the occasional splurge. All fine dining, all the time, means invite lists.
- Labelled ads. Everyone takes the odd partnership; the trustworthy ones mark it and keep it rare.
- Locals in the comments. Replies in the local language, regulars arguing about the second-best option — that's a community, not an audience.
Follow three or four accounts that pass, and your feed quietly becomes a scouting report for the trip.
Cross-check before you commit an evening
Even great local accounts age. A recommendation from 2024 might have a new chef by now, so give every pick a two-source check: look it up on the map and apply the high-rating, low-review-count read from finding hidden restaurants on Google Maps, then search the place on TikTok sorted by recent — the verification steps in finding travel spots on TikTok take a minute each. Two independent signals within the last few months, and you can book with confidence.
Together the three sources cover each other: locals for taste, the map for consistency, short-form video for what changed last month. A pick that clears all three is about as close to a guaranteed great evening as travel research gets.
Or let the gems come to you
Following, vetting and cross-checking accounts for every city you visit is a great system — and a real time sink. Gempin rolls it into one map: hidden-gem restaurants and sights trending on TikTok, Instagram and Google are pinned as Spots, matched to your taste, and every one you claim with a photo earns Gems to level up your travel character. The scouting is done before you land. Join the iOS early-access waitlist and spend the saved hours actually eating.