From Storytelling To Measurable Destination Growth
Stories Create Destinations
For decades, the tourism industry operated on the assumption: travelers choose where to go, and a DMO’s job is to out-advertise the competition. Today, that model has evolved. Audiences are already forming deep, emotional bonds with destinations through stories on screen long before they book a trip. Because stories now drive most decisions, modern DMOs must pivot from trying to convince travelers to choose their region, to figuring out how to manage, enrich, and deliver as curators of the narratives that already brought the traveler.
How I’m using these terms
Traveler: Anyone moving within or to a geographic space, encompassing international tourists, domestic visitors, and local residents engaging in staycations.
Destination: The targeted geographic area of any scale, ranging from local municipalities and states/provinces to entire nations and international regions.
DMO: A specialized agency tasked with promoting a destination to drive visitor economic spend.
Film Commission: The specialized agency tasked with attracting screen productions to a region through financial incentives, logistical support, and strategic promotion, creating economic impact.
Production ecosystem: The full foundational infrastructure required to support media creation, including financial incentives, local crew talent, sound stages, vendors, and streamlined permitting frameworks.
Screen tourism asset: A persistent narrative anchor, forged in the mind of the traveler by a screen story, that transforms a physical location into a cultural landmark. It relies on pre-existing local infrastructure but adds a permanent layer of emotional value that drives travel demand.
I’d like to suggest that for the largest segment of travelers, individuals choose destinations first, as they emotionally connect to the location through storytelling.
They fall in love with Middle-earth – and discover New Zealand.
They connect with the world of The Goonies – and suddenly Astoria, Oregon becomes a place they must visit.
They don’t dream about the steps in Philadelphia – they dream about raising their arms like Rocky and visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
They scheme and evade in the game Assassin’s Creed 2 – and they want to explore the unique landscape of Venice.
The emotional connection comes first and the desire to experience the destination follows. Think about the last trip you took because you wanted to experience something. It probably wasn’t because of a brochure. It was because of a story. Maybe it came from a movie, a streaming series, a video game, or a novel. But somewhere, before you ever booked a flight, a story made you care about the destination. You connected with it on some emotional level.
The Demand Pipeline
What builds these stories and the screen tourism demand? Most organizations would start with the visitor. However, we need to go much further upstream in this process. It begins with building out a “production ecosystem”.
The resources of the production ecosystem; tax incentives, crews, talent, community support, etc., and the “narrative world-building” the production is looking for, attract productions to the region.
Film commissions build and market this production ecosystem, compete for productions to choose their region, and facilitate filming at the location. The productions arrive, creating immediate economic impact through local spending within the ecosystem and community for the months they are located there.
The production leaves, and this is traditionally the end of the economic impact of the production, or story.
But this is where the story actually begins, as we transition from short-term economic impact to long-term value. Productions leave behind permanent screen tourism assets.
These assets are built on: Historic buildings, main streets, cafés and restaurants, parks, beaches, et. al. These locations have now become places where audiences formed emotional connections to stories. But too often, these screen tourism assets are unharvested, and that is what is missing: Asset Activation.
This is the stage where DMOs intentionally help visitors: discover filming locations, navigate to them, experience them, and spend money around them. Then the DMO can measure the resulting economic activity.
Screen tourism asset demand is activated, which results in destination visitation. Around the world, governments and communities have already invested hundreds of millions, and in many places, billions of dollars to build production ecosystems and attract productions. Those investments created permanent screen tourism assets that continue generating demand long after on the ground production ends.
Historically, the spend on developing the production ecosystem has been justified almost entirely by measuring production spending during filming. What if it could also demonstrate there is a ten, twenty, even fifty year tourism return from the same production ecosystem investment?
Most destinations have never built the system to activate those screen tourism assets or measure the visitor behavior and economic return they generate. With every dollar invested heavily in bringing productions, “new demand”, in comparison almost nothing is invested activating it.
The ROI from these production investments isn’t complete.
Screen Tourism Evidence
If we’re going to ask destinations to think differently, we need evidence.
Does the demand actually exist?
Does that demand convert into real visitation?
Does it create measurable economic value for destinations and local businesses?
And finally, can we actually measure it?
The short answer to all of these questions is: Yes!
It’s a measurable tourism sector that deserves to be managed, invested in, and evaluated like every other part of the visitor economy.
Global consumer demand
- Expedia’s 2026 research says 81% of Gen Z and Millennial travelers plan trips around film/TV locations, and 53% of global travelers report increased interest in screen-inspired travel. (Expedia Unpack 2026)
- Visit Britain found 9 out of 10 people considering a trip to the U.K. say they would be interested in visiting film and TV locations. (Visit Britain Internal Reporting Data)
- After the release of Wuthering Heights, searches for Yorkshire jumped 60% in six weeks and remained 35% higher year over year. (Expedia Unpack 2026)
Demand converts to visitation
- Astoria, Oregon – home to The Goonies house and many other films – promotes their region through SetJetters. 42% of their visitors were film tourists in 2023 (Oregon Film Internal Reporting Data 2026)
- The White Lotus Triggered a 300% spike in travel search demand for Hawai’i and Sicily with The Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea reported a 425% year-over-year spike in website visits and a 386% increase in reservation availability checks (Expedia 2026 and Fourseasons Resorts internal data)
Visitation creates economic value
- The 2014 film Wild contributed US$9.725M in direct production spend in Oregon. Its estimated the screen tourism spend for Wild over 2022-23 to be US$524K.
(SetJetters + Oregon Film) - In Scotland, screen tourism contributed approximately £161 million in one year.
(Screen Scotland) - New Zealand screen-inspired tourism generated an estimated NZ$2.7 billion in tourism expenditure annually, based on tourism spending for the year ended March 2024.
(NZ Film Commission)
Visitation and economic value measured
The industry has accepted that we can measure hotel stays, museum visits, airport arrivals, restaurant receipts, but somehow we’ve accepted that we cannot measure screen tourism’s behavioral data.
That’s not true anymore.
- 12 months after launching the SetJetters screen tourism platform, 36% of visitors to Oregon were measured as film tourists. (SetJetters internal data 2023)
- Globally, 90% of users view scenes within 500m of the location; 60% within 20m. (SetJetters internal data 2023)
Why aren’t DMOs treating screen tourism like every other measurable tourism sector?
What does activation look like?
What we typically see from destinations is activation of scene location assets as an occasional one time marketing campaign, occasionally as social media posts, and sometimes a movie map hidden somewhere on a website.
Activation involves building a screen tourism ecosystem that helps visitors move from inspiration to visiting, exploring, and local spending, where a direct economic impact can be measured. If the tourist doesn’t realize the screen tourism assets exist at a specific destination location, they won’t be able to visit them.
The activation of scene location assets starts with very accurate and easily discoverable location information.
A few examples SetJetters partnerships:
The Oregon Film Trail – Physical Infrastructure. Part of a statewide initiative of Oregon Film, administered through its affiliated non-profit, the Oregon Made Creative Foundation. It is the first coordinated statewide film trail of its kind in the United States.
The Oregon Film Trail, developed with local communities and tourism partners, currently includes 45 physical film-location signs at or near filming locations across the state. The initiative was conceived and has been led by Jane Ridley of Oregon Film.
Oregon is always looking to attract new productions; however, Oregon has more than a century of film and television history, encompassing over 700 productions. The opportunity was to activate that history and those locations. The film trail signs describe the film or films in the destination area and include a QR code that opens up the entire digital ecosystem of over 500 scene locations across Oregon and over 15,000 across the globe.
The visitor now has the ability to find the exact location of the screen tourism assets, interact with the scenes, and discover “near scene businesses” as well as engage with the screen tourism digital and physical ecosystem.
For Oregon, this activation transforms a static experience into a dynamic one for the visitor. The scene network has the ability to redistribute the visitor (and in turn, their anonymized visitation data), helping measure the reach and impact of film tourism. In the end, this continued, year round activation unlocks ROI (return on investment) on the incentives connected to Orgon’s production history, invested by the communities and taxpayers.
For Oregon, this activation transforms static filming locations into dynamic visitor experiences. Connecting locations into a statewide scene network encourages visitor movement while generating anonymized data to measure film tourism’s reach and impact. This year-round activation extends the value of Oregon’s production history, helping communities and taxpayers realize continued ROI on production incentives after productions have left.
Martha’s Vineyard celebrates JAWS – Experience Development. Beyond the 50th anniversary in 2025 of the film, JAWS, Martha’s Vineyard wants the screen tourism experience to be available year-round.
They want the tourists to participate in a shared story and screen tourism transition to economic development. We call this a “Beyond the frame” emphasis. Come for the scene and stay for everything else; take tours, buy souvenirs, dine, visit museums, rent bikes, etc.
The businesses closest to filming locations often receive the greatest benefit of screen tourism but are rarely included in the screen tourism strategy.
MV’s Chamber partnered with SetJetters in building out their scene location asset digital ecosystem and integrated the gamification aspect of SetJetters while featuring points of interest, near-scene businesses, scene collection badges, local guided tours, and movie prop discovery.
During the anniversary, this redistributed tourists away from scenes receiving a lot of tourist pressure, enhanced the discovery of natural heritage museums, drove traffic to local guides, and again, captured screen tourism behavioral data. This is something they had never had before, and now can measure the screen tourist visitations past the anniversary, throughout the year.
This was all through activating existing scenes and attractions in MV. The filming locations became the infrastructure of the event. This experience infrastructure now creates value every day, like a museum or historical attraction.
Greenwich, England, home of the Old Royal Naval College – Screen Tourism Event. The location contained over 200 film and television titles, with no infrastructure indicating where the scenes took place within the destination.
With Greenwich, SetJetters transformed over 100 scene locations into discoverable visitor experiences.
Screen tourists traveling to Greenwich, discovering Greenwich from elsewhere in London, or arriving in Greenwich unaware that their favorite film has a scene there, could now discover and find locations, collect scenes, follow themed routes, and discover near scene businesses.
Where they had nothing showcasing their scene location assets, by leveraging the SetJetters platform they now had an entire digital ecosystem on which they could highlight film-related events, such as the Guinness World Record-breaking “Most film character cosplayers in the world at one scene location”.
Greenwich and the Old Royal Naval College were now an interactive screen experience, and this infrastructure remains year-round, collecting measurable visitor behavior around event initiatives of all kinds.
The Future
How do DMOs convince people to choose their destination?
Marketing campaigns, visitor guides, advertising, and promoting attractions all matter. But what if, for millions of travelers, that decision had already been made before they ever visited your website?
Films, streaming TV series, video games, and their stories have already created the emotional connection and that decision.
You lean into the stories that have already convinced them to come and help them experience those stories in the real world, at your destination – the only place in the world where they can experience that connection.
Then the answer becomes: facilitate discovery of scene location assets, connect them to the community and local businesses, and measure the impact. You have then leveraged the demand.
That screen tourism visitation evidence is then used to make the case for the next production that chooses your destination.
You are building a destination strategy that transforms those stories into measurable, sustainable economic growth for decades after the cameras have gone home.
The tourism industry has spent decades measuring the return on marketing. The future of screen tourism is measuring the return on storytelling.
How is your organization calculating the value of the narrative? Moving from pure promotion to narrative stewardship requires a new playbook. If you are a DMO leader, film commissioner, or destination stakeholder, I invite you to join the conversation.
Connect with me in the comments to share your perspective, or email me at Erik@SetJetters.com to discuss your on-the-ground experiences. The industry is changing, and your insights are crucial
Sidebar: Perspectives on the Future of Screen Tourism
To broaden the conversation, I invited a group of industry leaders, practitioners and researchers working across tourism, screen production, destination marketing, pop culture and academia to review the article and share their perspectives. Their comments bring different lenses to the discussion, reinforcing some of the ideas presented here, while extending and challenging others, and offer additional insight into how screen tourism may evolve in the years ahead.
Sangkyun Kim Associate Professor of Tourism and Creative Industries, School of Business & Law, Edith Cowan University, Australia
“I have little doubt that film tourism will continue to grow in significance, and I agree that close and proactive collaboration among relevant stakeholders, particularly film commissions and DMOs, will be essential. These stakeholders must also recognize the full spectrum of film tourism’s immediate and long-term value at every stage of development and destination management. More importantly, however, we need to pay greater attention to the forces that may challenge or reshape our current understanding of the film tourism phenomenon. Among these, the rise of webtoons and the growing prevalence of transmedia storytelling are particularly significant. Together, they are fundamentally transforming the ways in which global audiences consume popular media through the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. As a result, they introduce an additional layer of complexity to an already multifaceted film tourism ecosystem.
There is therefore a pressing need to better understand how the interconnectedness of different media forms and the expansion of stories across multiple platforms influence film tourism. Specifically, greater attention should be paid to how audiences navigate between media products and how these cross- platform narrative experiences shape the visitor journey, from initial inspiration and destination awareness to on-site exploration and local spending. Such developments offer an opportunity to advance our understanding of changing media consumption patterns among both current and emerging generations of film tourists. More importantly, they challenge traditional assumptions about the relationship between screen content and destination visitation, opening new avenues for research and practice on how evolving media ecosystems can be leveraged to enhance film tourism outcomes.”
Matt Stiker Senior VP Madden + KH
Tourism and Brand Marketing Agency
“For tourism DMOs, making the investment in screen tourism is similar to investing in the construction of a convention center, the “buying” of a convention, or the “purchase” of a new air route; the return won’t be immediate, but it is inevitable. And the biggest difference is that in those other three cases, they’ve historically been far more measurable, far more provable to key DMO stakeholders such as hoteliers. But the work you’ve been doing with Oregon Film and others is making “jetsetting” far more than a leisure trend – because of the ability not just to demonstrate number of visitors but the actual economic impact, DMOs now have another tool in their toolbox for marketing the uniqueness of their destination.”
Mindy Raymond Film Producer • Studio Development Strategist • Co-Founder, ShineCo & Rolling Reels • Advocate for Women in Film
“Yes! And with the rise of social media, screen tourism now has an even greater ripple effect. When we see friends and family experiencing a destination connected to a film or series, it gives us an opportunity to see that place through a new lens and extends the power of that initial screen tourism activation even further.
We talk about this all the time with our clients at ShineCo. The impact doesn’t stop with the production, or even with the visitor. That visitor shares their experience, which can inspire their friends and family to see the destination differently and potentially experience it for themselves. It creates ripple after ripple.
Screen tourism truly can be the gift that keeps on giving, especially when that momentum is intentionally harnessed and steered in the right direction.”
Christine Lundberg Professor of Tourism Management | UiS School of Business and Law | University of Stavanger | Local PL for HERITOUR – Horizon Europe – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
“Mobility can begin long before physical travel takes place: through the Theatre of the Mind, screen productions enable people to travel imaginatively and form emotional connections with destinations before ever encountering them in person. In this sense, the eventual journey may be less a first encounter with a place than physical mobility into a world already experienced through screen production, challenging DMOs to rethink traditional approaches to attracting visitation.”
Lundberg, C., Ziakas, V. & Lindström, K. (2024). The Everyday Tourist: Traveling the Theatre of the Mind in the Wake of Permacrisis. In S. Reijnders, E. Martens & A. Nanjangud (Eds), Worlds of Imagination: Global Perspectives on Media, Tourism and Culture. Routledge. The Everyday Tourist | 9 | Traveling the Theater of the Mind in the Wa
Jane Ridley Director of Strategic Initiatives & Community Projects
Oregon Film | Oregon Film Trail
“Oregon has been at the forefront of screen tourism, investing in the infrastructure needed to sustain it. Through the Oregon Film Trail, we have built a statewide network that connects physical markers with more than 500 digital scene locations, while working directly with communities to determine how best to share their screen history. We are also developing new ways for communities to activate that history through locally tailored experiences that encourage visitors to explore more deeply and, in turn, support local businesses. We are beginning to explore how this infrastructure can also support workforce development and create pathways to tourism-related jobs within local communities. For us, this work is both economic development and cultural stewardship: preserving Oregon’s filmmaking legacy, creating meaningful visitor experiences and extending the value of Oregon-made productions long after filming ends. The more we do this work, the more clearly we see that film tourism serves as a bridge between production and our communities. Film tourism sits at the intersection of economic development, cultural preservation and community vitality. It should be a core consideration for film offices and their destination partners.”
About the Author:
Erik Nachtrieb
CEO & Cofounder, SetJetters
ShotSync Image: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
