I got caught in an Instagram trap
A social-media hot spot where the “wellness paths” lead nowhere.
Here’s me participating in the Instagram trap cycle in 2017. —Kate
My friend Hannah just moved to Los Angeles, so on her final weekend in town, my friends and I boarded the [redacted] ferry headed to a spa on an island I shall not name. We had heard about this spa from TikTok, where creators gushed over its view of the Manhattan skyline and decadent pools and saunas. It wasn’t until we were through check-in, surrounded by bees on the only available pool chairs, that the realization hit: We weren’t in a spa. We were in an Instagram trap.
While the term “Instagram trap” has mostly been used to describe museums and art shows, it’s really any place that’s haphazardly constructed to resemble a real attraction when it’s actually just a front for people to take pretty photos. The Museum of Ice Cream, to name a famous example, doesn’t purport to be anything other than a series of photo opps. But there are more sinister Instagram traps: trendy restaurants where the food is shit, buzzy musical festivals that leave you stranded in the Bahamas, or highly-recommended day spas that put the pool above the grassy seating area in which water then collects and turns muddy. One notable exception aside, people still post fawningly about these places on social media, anyway.
Having arrived at the spa at 1 pm, we figured we were just hangry and that one of the establishment’s $24 salads would perk us up. Unfortunately, the tap-to-pay wristband they had connected to my debit card was not working. No matter, the cashier told me, just ask for a new one at reception upstairs.
“Do I need to go get my debit card, which I left back in the locker room?” I asked.
“You do not,” they replied.
I did! The front desk receptionist instructs me to retrace my steps yet again to retrieve it.
All this traipsing around wouldn’t have been a problem if the building’s geography wasn’t so confusing. We had booked the “wellness experience,” and so when the first door we saw was marked “wellness path,” we entered, thinking we were going to be gently guided along, as if in an Ikea. Instead, we were met with a series of stairs. We picked the set that looked most like they would take us to a pool—but they deposited us in a room full of chairs. A plaque on the wall recommended that attendees take 15 minutes to enjoy the room’s “experience” (sitting in chairs). We passed on that and headed to the next door we saw marked “wellness path,” thinking things would soon become more coherent. Instead, we got more stairs.
Hannah asked about the “wellness path” during her massage and learned that this is just the spa's term for “stairwell.” The word “wellness” was used everywhere, including on the door of a bathroom stall that was closed for maintenance, on which hung a sign that read “wellness in progress” (the spa's term for unclogging the shitter).
Things improved when I had my massage, and even more so when I doubled over laughing after my friend Jehan revealed she was the only one of us offered disposable underwear, for some reason.
I wandered through the various saunas, detecting no discernable difference between them, taking advantage of the creams and exfoliants I found along the way. I spent most of the afternoon in the quieter second pool off to the side of the building, reading my book and wondering why three extremely bored lifeguards were assigned to one body of water with the max depth of your average garden gnome. It was all fine—nice, even! But for close to $300 each, it was not money well spent.
On the ferry ride home, we indulged in a favorite activity: Reading the bad Google reviews posted by people who experienced the same problems as us—the expensive food, the gimmicky rooms, the lack of policies preventing people from claiming the nicest pool chairs by putting their towels on them and then, I assume, getting lost on a “wellness path.”
But the official reviews of the spa, published by outlets like Well + Good and PureWow, are glowing. And so are the posts about it on TikTok and Instagram. Such is the way—the envy Instagram traps provoke from others scrolling your feed makes it easy to forgive the particulars of the experience. Your followers are then inspired to go themselves, and the cycle continues.
Overall, I did have fun, mostly because I’ve known myself for 29 years and am well aware I would have found something to complain about regardless. In fact, here’s a picture of us to prove how much fun I had—oh, where am I? This amazing little spa on the river, you have to try it out!
