Wanderlust: 80+ Travel Captions For Instagram

Social media marketers and influencers have enough on their plate. Whether it’s automating the setup process with a freelance recruiter contract template, or social media scheduler, anything that helps save time and effort is welcome.

So when platforms like Instagram require travel accounts to produce a constant churn of content, it’s no fun coming up with travel captions for Instagram when you could be traveling yourself. Or editing the photos, videos, and Reels which are what your audience came for.

While they might feel like an afterthought to great photos and videos, good captions lead to more engagement. You have to play to the algorithm as well as your followers. And if you’re a business, the captions are an important part of defining your brand’s voice and personality; that’s especially true if you’re reposting some or all of your content (with permission!). So good captions have direct and indirect benefits to your page and your marketing funnel overall.

The caption is even more important if you’re aiming for organic growth on Instagram, as opposed to sponsored posts. While sponsored posts let you include a CTA button like “Contact Us”, “Learn More”, “Download”, and more, all you can do on organic posts is say “link in bio”.

If you want to get conversions on your Instagram posts, you need a caption that’s worth reading till the end. That’s as true for random Instagram users finding your posts in their Explore page as it is for your regular followers, who you need to “train” to expect good captions that are worth clicking and reading.

And the only way you’re getting in front of new people via the Explore page is by getting good engagement on your posts: likes, comments, reshares. The caption is a way to add extra value and meaning to a post, and if that’s the extra step that gets people to click and engage then it’s an important part of your growth strategy.

80+ travel captions for instagram

So when you need a caption that’s going to stop people in their scroll, keep this article bookmarked so you can schedule your post and get right back to your marketing strategy or groundbreaking commercial proposal.

Free to use image sourced from Unsplash

Interesting definition captions

A new word is a new idea. These short definitions of interesting words will get people reading and learning something new. If Instagram cuts your caption off halfway through, the opening promises something interesting for people who click to expand it.

• Cockaigne (noun) an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease
• Coddiwomple (verb) to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination
• Dépaysement (noun) the good or bad feeling that comes from being in a foreign country
• Dérive (noun) a spontaneous journey, led only by the spirit of the landscape
• Eleutheromania (noun) an irresistible yearning for freedom
• Exulansis (noun) the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because others are unable to relate to it
• Fernweh (noun) homesickness for a place you’ve never been to; a feeling stronger than wanderlust
• Gadabout (noun) a person who travels to many different places, especially for pleasure
• Hiraeth (noun) a homesickness for a place which you can’t return to or never was
• Morii (noun) the desire to capture a fleeting experience
• Nemophilist (noun) a person who is fond of forests or forest scenery
• Numinous (adj.) feeling both fearful and awed by what is before you
• Onism (noun) the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience
• Peregrinate (verb) to travel or wander around from place to place
• Wanderlust: (noun) a strong desire for or impulse to wander or travel and explore the world
• Wayfarer (noun) a person who travels on foot
• Yūgen (noun) a profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe that triggers a deep emotional response

Free to use image sourced from Unsplash

Short captions

On Instagram, shorter is better.

The main reason is obvious: people are more likely to read the whole caption if they’re shorter. Shorter captions increase the chances that readers will get the entire message and act on any important CTAs like your “link in bio!” at the end.

And in general, shorter captions are often more impactful. It’s always better to convey your message as efficiently as possible, and not bury your key message at the end of a long, winding blog post you’ve inserted in the caption.

Like anyone, Instagram users love a good story. But if that’s what you want to do, the ideal place for it is an Instagram Reel where you can include visuals to enhance your key messages, and save the caption there for hashtags and your CTA.

Aim for 120 to 150 characters max. for your main caption, or you’ll run up again Instagram’s “See More” cutoff, which many users won’t bother to click on without good reason. Make sure your key point is above that cutoff, and reserve the space below that for hashtags which will only really be read by Instagram’s algorithm.

When you need something short and sweet for your travel posts, keep these airy, positive captions ready for any one of your travel posts and let the photos do the heavy lifting.

• Adventure is worthwhile.
• All good things are wild and free.
• Always take the scenic route.
• Better than my wildest dreams.
• Born to explore the world.
• Eat well, travel often.
• Every day is an adventure.
• Got wonderfully lost.
• Head in the clouds.
• Heaven on earth.
• I read, I travel, I become.
• Life is better in flip flops.
• Life is short. Book the trip.
• Love at first flight.
• Love, travel. Both amazing, incredible together.
• Meet me under the palms.
• My home away from home.
• My sweet escape.
• Never stop exploring.
• Never stop your wanderlust.
• One with the clouds.

Free to use image sourced from Unsplash

Inspiring quotes

Sometimes someone else just said it best… but you don’t want to find yourself asking, “What is a waiver form?” when using someone else’s words. While you can’t quote other people’s travel captions without written permission, famous writers and other public figures have spilled plenty of ink on the subject of travel, and most of the best quotes were either offhand remarks or have long since entered the public domain. Keep these famous, not so famous, and inspiring quotes at hand.

A good quote is also a great value-add to a post. If it would otherwise just be a nice photo or video, a good quote can add something shareable to the post and tie the photo into a larger point or idea that your audience would share. And if you get a quote from a cult hero like Jack Kerouac or Anthony Bourdain, people might share your post for that alone.

• “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” — Lao Tzu
• “Adventure should be part of everyone’s life. It is the whole difference between being fully alive and just existing.” – Holly Morris
• “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” ― Jack Kerouac
• “Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times.” — Asian Proverb
• “Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?” — Caroline Myss
• “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
• “I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” — Eric Roth
• “I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” — Rosalía de Castro
• “I travel because it makes me realize how much I haven’t seen, how much I’m not going to see, and how much I still need to see.” – Carew Papritz
• “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take.” — Lewis Carroll
• “Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.” — Michael Palin
• “Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.” — Freya Stark
• “There’s no time to be bored in a world as beautiful as this.” — John Ruskin
• “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “To live would be an awfully big adventure”– Peter Pan
• “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float. To gain all while you give. To roam the roads of lands remote. To travel is to live.” — Hans Christian Andersen
• “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” — Bill Bryson
• “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” — Aldous Huxley
• “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
• “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” — David Mitchell
• “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” –Mark Twain
• “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” – Paulo Coelho
• “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. 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
• “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
• “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
• “Wherever you are, be all there.” — Jim Elliot
• “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” — Confucius
• “You need not even listen, just wait… the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.” — Franz Kafka

Free to use image sourced from Unsplash

Punny captions

Nothing will get a rise out of people like a cheesy pun. If you’re posting about specific locations, keep these at hand to get eyes rolling. The worse, the better. The wordplay here is best suited for bloggers with social media accounts.

• A good glass of wine is never Faro way in Portugal.
• Alberobello is Trulli amazing.
• Came to Italy to find Rome-ance.
• Canada is amooseing!
• Canyon believe this view?
• Czech out the view!
• Do you want Togo to Africa?
• Eiffel in love with Paris.
• Eye love London!
• Find someone who looks at you the way I look at the Eiffel Tower.
• Had a (sand)sational time in Dubai!
• Havana good time in Cuba.
• How Kenya leave this place?
• I just had a match with someone in South Korea. I think he’s my Seoul mate.
• I just want to Rome the world.
• I mean, I’m just China have a good time.
• I really Haiti to leave this place, but it’s time to go home.
• I want to go to Bora Bora but I’m poora poora.
• I’m Tallinn you this place is awesome!
• I’ve got a Berning desire to go to Switzerland.

Saving time with travel captions

Anything from an Instagram caption to a release of liability template helps marketers and pro social media users get posts out the door and get back to what it is they love: traveling themselves, or getting beautiful photography and videos out to their audience on social media. Keep this post in your bookmarks and whenever you find yourself stuck for a caption, one of these is sure to do the job for you.