Fancy a summer holiday in Uzbekistan? How about Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan? You wouldn’t be the only one - thanks to Reddit, an increasing force in destination inspiration.

Much like on Instagram or the extended family WhatsApp group, one of the done things on the main Reddit travel forum - ie the /travel subreddit - is to post snaps from your most recent holiday. But which destination shot received the most upvotes, the equivalent of a like, in this community of more than 14 million travellers over the past year? It wasn’t a café terrace in Paris, a secluded bay in Greece or an overwater bungalow in the Maldives, but rather the turquoise-tiled Kalta Minor Minaret in Khiva, Uzbekistan (32,000 upvotes). Obviously, The Caspian Post reports via The Sunday Times.

Many of the posts that do big numbers on this subreddit tend towards the under-the-radar and adventurous. Other top photos from the past year are captioned “I just got back from Antarctica. It was life-changing” (23,000 upvotes), “Out of all the beautiful things in Syria, it’s hard to pick my highlights” (18,000) and “Iraq - stole my heart” (15,000). It is like peering into an alternative universe where no one goes to Spain or Italy and everyone has an opinion on which country in the South Caucasus is their favourite. Niche reigns supreme.

But increasingly, thanks to Reddit’s growing popularity, niche is becoming mainstream. Active daily users on the platform have more than doubled over the past five years, from about 50 million in 2021 to nearly 120 million today. In the UK alone, monthly visitors to Reddit increased from 19 million in November 2023 to 32 million - nearly half the population - in November last year, according to the research firm Ipsos.

And there’s a good reason for that: in February 2024 Google and Reddit agreed a partnership in which the former would pay the latter an estimated $60 million (£45 million) per year to train its AI on users’ posts. Lo and behold, Reddit links proliferated on Google search results.

Now, when you search for a generic phrase such as “best places to travel”, one of the top results is likely to be a Reddit thread, and little wonder: by sending more traffic there, this will encourage more forum usage and provide more data for AI training purposes. In my case (your search results may also be influenced by your browser history), I see a post from Embarrassed-Wolf-609, who has been to 105 countries and names their five top underrated destinations as Georgia, Oman, Ecuador, Namibia and Taiwan.

We aren’t turning to Reddit just because of the machinations of big tech, though. People, including me, enjoy using it. Like other social media, it is a bountiful source of holiday inspiration, but here you don’t have to know who to follow; dive into one of the main travel-themed subreddits such as /travel, /solotravel or /backpacking and you’ll find tens of thousands of passionate voices from around the world. And unlike the “infinite scroll” of other platforms, there’s no algorithm presenting you with endless stuff you’re not interested in.

In contrast to Instagram, it also feels authentic. Many of us don’t want to read itineraries generated by large language models and would rather browse the original human recommendations they’re trained on. Reddit is largely free of influencers, sponsored content and self-promotion, which is banned in most subreddits. And boy are communities such as /travel, /solotravel and /backpacking active: you are pretty much guaranteed to have recommendations fired at you by other users within minutes of posting.

So, which regions appear to be experiencing a Reddit tourism boom? As suggested by that popular minaret snap, one beneficiary is central Asia - an affordable part of the world with an abundance of natural beauty, lending itself nicely to the “hidden gem” narrative that tends to take off on the platform. Aesthetics are important: in the /travel subreddit, you’ll find hundreds upon hundreds of photos of the dazzling blue mosques and madrassas of Uzbekistan; the endless steppes of Kazakhstan; and the jagged, snow-capped peaks of Kyrgyzstan.

Google searches for these destinations have grown in line with Reddit’s soaring popularity. Worldwide searches for Uzbekistan have risen 168 per cent, comparing the first five months of this year with the same period in 2025; Kazakhstan is up 208 per cent; and Kyrgyzstan 37 per cent (the real figure is likely to be higher given how hard it is to spell).

The tour operator Intrepid said Uzbekistan bookings increased 132 per cent between 2019 and 2025, while the adventure specialist Wild Frontiers said Kyrgyzstan sales were up 30 per cent last year compared with 2024, and another 15 per cent in 2026 so far.

Sophie Ibbotson, Uzbekistan’s former UK-based tourism ambassador and author of the Uzbekistan Bradt travel guide, said: “With the new Google AI search, Reddit is one of the main sources that it pulls from. When people are looking for ‘where do I go on holiday’, ‘photogenic holiday’, ‘exotic holiday’ and so on, Uzbekistan is much more prominent in the search results than it was before.”

She adds that recent appearances on Race Across the World, Michael Portillo’s Great Central Asian Railway Journeys and Bettany Hughes’ Treasures of the World have boosted the country’s profile. Visa-free travel and the availability of direct flights that avoid layovers in the Middle East have also contributed.

Another region that’s trending in part thanks to Reddit is the South Caucasus, particularly Georgia (whose mountaintop and lakeside churches are especially photogenic) and Armenia (ditto). Wild Frontiers bookings for Georgia are up 30 per cent year on year. Michael Pullman, head of marketing, said it received the Reddit “hug of death” a few years ago when someone posted a picture on a subreddit of wildflower-strewn Georgian mountains, taken from its website. So many people visited the site that it crashed.

“What I love about Reddit is that it serves niche interests,” Pullman adds. “No matter how niche the thing you’re into, there’s a subforum for it with people who share that passion, so by its nature it’s going to be a good place to find out about these up-and-coming, undiscovered, not-so-crowded destinations.”

In a sign that the airline industry is following Reddit trends closely, last year both easyJet and British Airways started running direct flights from the UK to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. And on Monday this week Wizz Air launched the UK’s first direct link with Yerevan, the Armenian capital. As it happens, I’m flying there tomorrow. You know where to look to find out my highlights.

By Huw Oliver