Show Them What You've Got

Film tourism, despite being considered as a niche product has proved in some cases to be one of the main generators of tourist arrivals. Each time more and more destination marketers consider it to be a very effective promotional tool and don't doubt much when spending sufficient amount of their budgets on it. Now it became obvious that traditional marketing campaigns, which include boring and annoying advertising through billboards, TV commercials, magazine ads featuring the locations are not really effective anymore. People would hardly be able to recall the names of destinations and what is worse could be thinking of completely different locations. So to avoid this wastage of money, time and people's patience its time to come up with something more creative. It's time to listen first to what customers really like to watch and experience, and after that to adapt and deliver the right product. Actually it's never been easier, just hang on for a moment, listen and watch what movies people really like and then just get creative. The most important is to make sure that the message got across to the right audience and made a difference. 

Here is one of the best examples how effective cooperation and partnership created the whole image for the destination. Even after years passed, for some people, New Zealand is still being associated with "Lord of the Rings" movie, which had a massive impact on the tourist arrivals.

As it was noticed, Ireland is following this tendency by building a tourism campaign around the series of "Game of Thrones". The destination is advertising is intended on fans of the famous series.

Another destination was spotted adopting this effective method is Iceland- a North Atlantic island, famous for its hot springs, geysers and active volcanoes. The country didn't actually have that much media coverage, except for 2010 when there was a volcanic eruption, causing impact on the whole Europe and obviously affecting negatively their tourism industry. But now its all in the past and here we go another example of destination marketing through a movie. This time its "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" with Ben Stiller in the main role.

Obviously there is a big variety of activities which could be implemented in connection with movie tourism. There are many websites and mobile applications as well as social media interactive content has been developed, where people interested in movie destinations can find entertainment. In order to promote this recent popularity of film tourism, VisitBritain developed the whole marketing campaign "Film is GREAT Britain" through social media, also launching Film and TV section on their website LoveWall and many other events and prize draws. It is really good to see that recent marketing activities are in fact intended on much larger spectrum of audience, where everybody can find something they are interested in.

However, it should be pointed out that not all activities which include filming the destination are that successful. As an example we could consider the movie "Borat" and featuring of Kazakhstan in that movie. It is possible to say that some visits were generated by this movie, however the contradictory nature of it still raises many debatable issues.