Other travel companies take the experience even further by placing travelers right in the plot of their favorite series. OvationNetwork travel advisor Christopher Bellot recently studied every episode of The White Lotus’s first season to plan a murder mystery group trip for a client’s milestone birthday held at the Four Seasons Wailea, where the show was filmed.
“I had newspapers printed that were delivered each day ‘covering’ the ‘murder’ investigation and we named different guests and people of interest, then the ‘perpetrator’ was revealed at a special dinner on the sand complete with White Lotus Resort branding,” he tells AD. “We have so few shared experiences these days with so much going on in the world that when groups of friends or a family find something, it really adds tremendous fun and great memories to embrace it. Who doesn’t want to spend a few days living inside their favorite show or movie?”
While one aspect of set-jetting is visiting bucket list places that top many travelers’ lists, like Paris and Hawaii, another aspect is that the trend brings travelers to destinations they would have never otherwise considered. For Lauren Bunde, a publicist based in Brooklyn, HBO’s My Brilliant Friend inspired her to book a trip to the volcanic Italian island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples.
“I had never heard of Ischia before seeing [the characters] travel to the island on the series,” she tells AD. “In season two episode four, the main characters spend a day on the beach in Ischia, and while there’s a lot of drama going on between them, it’s difficult not to be distracted by the beauty of the place they’re filming.”
Conversely, the destinations aren’t always the most glamorous. AMC’s Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul inspired battery specialist Steve Brown to book a far-flung journey from Chichester, England, to Albuquerque to see the show’s famous (and sometimes infamous) sites including Combo’s Corner, the home of main character Walter White, Owl Café, and Twisters, the filming location of the fictional restaurant Los Pollos Hermanos. The experience was a stark contrast to his daily life in southern England. “In New Mexico, the desert seems huge and empty, and the landscape contrasts acutely with England’s lush, green, verdant, fields full of wet sheep,” he tells AD. “It’s that feeling of my own insignificance in that vast desert scape that was unfamiliar and remarkable to me.”