Nowadays visiting cities in which movies or TV series were filmed has become a trend. The aim of the research is to find out how much this phenomenon influences people’s travel interest. Starting from Google Trends data, the visualization shows, year by year, the change of interest in a city from 2004 until November 2019, highlighting the release years of films shot in the analysed locations.
Main Findings
When it comes to movies, tourist interest increases in the years following the release date and it usually lasts for a short period of time. While for TV series, it usually increases near or after the final season, since popularity comes over the years, and lasts more.
There is always an increment in tourism before and after a movie or TV series is released. The most interesting cases are: Ubud (Eat, Pray, Love); Nashville (Nashville), Chernobyl (Chernobyl), Medellìn (Narcos), Albuquerque (Breaking Bad) and Game of Thrones’ locations.
From all the different cases, the city of Nashville, in which the TV show Nashville was filmed, has seen the greatest increment in tourist interest. It has raised from a negative amount to approximately the same number, but positive.
Even if the Harry Potter saga counts a great number of fans and the reproduction of the movies places has created a huge growth, there is a visible decrease in London tourism interest. However, this was caused by external causes like the terrorist attacks that happened in 2005.
Besides movies and TV series, it came out that even animated movies, such as Frozen, can increase tourism. Both from data and articles, we discovered that a lot of people are going to enjoy the mountains and the landscapes in Geiranger, Norway, from which the Frozen film took inspiration.
Protocol
