ABSTRACT

Tourists as consumers are increasingly searching for and demanding new experiences. Film can provide such profound experiences, allowing the viewer to transcend what may be termed the shallowness of everyday life and be transported to another place, to view somewhere which may be inherently new to or different for them. Tourists may then seek to recapture or replicate the experience gained from viewing the film by actually travelling to and spending time in the place they were drawn to. Films or movies, therefore, provide us with a window into other places that broaden our knowledge and can fuel our desire to travel. What has become known as film-induced tourism has begun to gather momentum as an area of both academic research and industry interest. However, the phenomenon is wide-ranging and, according to Beeton (2005), still a largely untapped and little-understood field of tourism research. Much of the literature to date has focused on the promotional aspects and the impacts of the phenomenon, with little research into the motivations of the film-induced tourists themselves. Furthermore, films are not always shot in the place they portray on screen. This has become a common occurrence and it is not unusual for a film to be made in a completely different country from that it portrays. This form of displacement creates issues of authenticity and implications as to where the tourist influenced by such a film will choose to visit. This aspect of film tourism has been mentioned briefly by authors such as Beeton (2005), Hudson and Ritchie (2006a) and Shandley et al. (2006) but they have not conducted investigations themselves and to date there have been no in-depth research studies into this aspect of the phenomenon.