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Part of the fun of a summer holiday is planning where to go. But how to decide?

Well, you might be surprised by the number of people who use the movies they’ve seen as inspiration for their travel plans. It’s so popular the travel industry has even come up with a name for it, ‘set-jetting’ (see what they did there?).

Here are six movies that have sent the crowds flocking to the places where they were filmed – and which have caused the occasional problem for the locals.

New Zealand (Lord Of The Rings)

Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit movies transported audiences to the incredible landscapes of Middle Earth.

With its soaring mountains and rolling meadows, the landscape is as much of a draw as the movies’ epic tale of hobbits, wizards and dwarves. Jackson shot the film in his native New Zealand, building an entire studio just to make the film.

What he couldn’t have expected is how many people would want to visit after they saw the movie. Between 2001, when the first movie was released, and 2006 - tourism grew a whopping forty percent, with six per cent of all visitors to the country saying that the Tolkien movies were part of the reason for going there.

The village (Hobbiton) that Jackson built for the movies, and which was given permanent status as a tourist destination, attracts up to 650,000 visitors a year.

Pennan, Scotland (Local Hero)

Local Hero was a smash hit British movie released back in 1983. It told the story of an American oil-executive (played by then superstar Burt Lancaster) who journeys to a remote Scottish village to buy it and develop an oil refinery, but then falls in love with the place and its locals.

Tourists, particularly American ones, soon started arriving in droves to see the stunning locations in and around Pennan where the movie was filmed, including the rows of sea-facing houses. Beach scenes were filmed at Camusdarach Beach which, although seemingly close to Pennan on film, is actually on the opposite side of Scotland.

But the focal point for Local Hero fans is the iconic red phone box that features in the movie (Lancaster’s character calls his company in America every evening from it) that sits on the edge of the pretty harbour.

It’s so popular that when, in 2021, BT planned to upgrade the kiosk a campaign was launched to save it. And to this day locals paints the phone box regularly to keep it looking perfect for the visitors who still make the trip.

Maya Bay, Thailand (The Beach)

Danny Boyle’s 2000 hit The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was about a group of backpackers who discover a secret, unspoiled beach. So it’s more than a bit ironic that the result of the movie’s success was that Maya Bay, on the island of Phi Phi Leh in southern Thailand, where he filmed it was soon anything but a secret and ended up pretty badly spoiled.

Soon after the film’s release tourists started flocking to Maya Bay. Before the movie about 170 people had visited a day. But at Beach-mania’s peak, more than 5,000 people were turning up on the sandy shores, which can only be reached by boat.

While the beach had always been a local attraction this influx of new, mostly foreign visitors, often by speedboat, did huge damage to the area. Coral reefs were destroyed, plants were trampled and litter also became a problem.

Finally, in 2018, the beach was closed in order to try to repair some of the damage done. It reopened in 2022 with strict new limits on the number of people who can visit and where they could go, but it still closes regularly for environmental recovery, more than 20 years after the film's original release.

Skellig Michael, Ireland (Star Wars)

Skellig Michael (sometimes called Great Skellig and with an Irish spelling of Sceilg Mhichíl) is the larger of a rugged pair of islands that jut dramatically out of the Atlantic Ocean about eight miles off the Republic of Ireland's south west coast. The spectacular landmarks are a UNESCO World Heritage site, partly because of the monastery on the Peak of Great Skellig which dates back to between the 6th and 8th Century AD.

It’s remote and lonely, a perfect location for Star Wars' Luke Skywalker to retreat to in 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens and 2017's The Last Jedi, where it doubled for Ahch-To, the water-covered planet where the Jedi Order was founded.

After the films were released, Star Wars fans flocked both to Skellig Michael and the other locations in the Republic of Ireland where the movie series was shot. The Irish Tourism Confederacy estimated in 2017, following the release of The Last Jedi, that the film had been worth 40 million euros to the nation’s tourism industry in free advertising.

In 2016, 14,700 visitors made the boat trip and arduous stair-climb to the island’s peak, well up on previous years' numbers. But this increase raised concerns about protecting the location. UNESCO advises that a maximum of 180 visitors be allowed per day.

Dyersville, Iowa (Field Of Dreams)

“If you build it they will come,” is one of the most famous lines from 1989’s baseball drama Field Of Dreams, and when it came to the baseball triangle built especially for the shooting of the movie, they certainly did.

The film is about a farmer, played by Kevin Costner, who is inspired to build a baseball field in the middle of his cornfields. To shoot the movie, director Phil Alden Robinson's crew constructed a full-sized baseball diamond in a real Iowa cornfield near the small town of Dyersville.

The film was a huge hit, and fans soon started flocking to Dyersville (which had a population of 4,550 in 2022) to see the location for themselves. The town began welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, and real major league games are now regularly played on the field.

Forks, Washington (The Twilight Saga)

Author Stephenie Meyer had never even visited the small town of Forks in Washington State when she set her Twilight books, published between 2005 and 2020, there. But its reputation for spectacular forest scenery and gloomy overcast weather seemed like the perfect place to set her moody tale of vampires and werewolves.

Despite the fact that none of the scenes for the movie were shot in the town (most filming was done in Portland, Oregon) Forks was soon swamped with fans of Bella, Jacob and Edward. In 2004, the town saw only 5,000 visitors, but in 2010, two years after the first movie came out, 72,000 people flocked to the tiny town, which had a population of 3,379 in 2022.

The influx of tourists was a boon to the region, which had suffered economically in the 1980s because of the decline of the local lumber industry. Locals have embraced their new visitors, putting on Twilight tours, themed attractions and even a Twilight In Forks Festival to cater to the fans.

This article was published in June 2024