Set-Jetting: How Your Watchlist Became Your 2026 Travel Itinerary

The fastest-growing travel agent of 2026 is not a person. It is your watchlist. A generation of travelers now treats the closing credits of a hit show as a packing list, booking flights to the beaches, castles, and skylines they first fell for on screen. The industry calls it set-jetting, and it has quietly grown from a fan quirk into one of the defining forces shaping where people go this year.

The numbers are hard to ignore. According to Expedia's Unpack '26 forecast, 81% of Gen Z and Millennial travelers now plan trips around places they have seen in film and television, and 53% of travelers worldwide say their appetite for screen-inspired getaways has grown over the past year. Put a price on that behavior and the scale becomes clear: analysts estimate set-jetting could be worth as much as $8 billion in the United States alone, with roughly 13% of American travelers saying they have already booked a trip after spotting a location on screen.

Why a single show now moves more travelers than a glossy campaign

A tourism board can spend years and millions trying to make a destination feel aspirational. A streaming hit can do it in a weekend. The difference is trust. A drone shot in a commercial reads as an ad, while the same coastline filmed as the backdrop to a story you have binged for eight hours feels like a place you already know. By the time the season ends, the destination is not a stranger. It is a setting you have lived inside.

That emotional shortcut is why screen-inspired travel keeps outpacing traditional marketing, and why Lonely Planet and Google's travel team both flagged set-jetting as a headline trend for the year. The screen does the storytelling. The booking engine just collects the demand.

The shows pulling travelers around the map in 2026

No single title illustrates the effect better than the third season of The White Lotus, set in Thailand. After the season showcased Koh Samui and Bangkok, travel sellers reported a 312% jump in bookings to the Four Seasons resort that doubled as the fictional hotel, while online searches for the island spiked by 88%. The boom was strong enough that the Tourism Council of Thailand suggested Koh Samui might skip its usual low season entirely on the strength of the show, and Expedia data showed flight searches to the island climbing sharply year over year.

Thai islands like Koh Samui saw a booking surge after The White Lotus brought them to a global audience.

The big screen is doing the same work. Avatar: Fire and Ash arrived in late 2025 and sent attention back to New Zealand, where James Cameron has made Wellington the permanent home of the franchise and where roughly 100 international productions have already turned fiords, forests, and farmland into instantly recognizable backdrops. The country has spent two decades converting Middle-earth and Pandora into a tourism identity, and the latest Avatar chapter keeps the pipeline full.

New Zealand has spent decades turning its landscapes into a recognizable on-screen brand, from Middle-earth to Pandora.

The rest of the 2026 slate spreads the demand wider. Expedia and other forecasters point to Yorkshire riding a wave from period dramas, Hawaii and Samoa drawing fans of the live-action Moana, the lagoons of Palawan in the Philippines stepping into the spotlight, and Los Angeles cashing in as the all-in-one backdrop for shows like Nobody Wants This, among the year's most-watched screen destinations.

Destinations are no longer waiting to be discovered

The smartest tourism boards have stopped treating screen fame as luck and started treating it as strategy. Britain has leaned into a screen tourism push that promotes filming locations across regions like Yorkshire, Cornwall, and Bath, while Croatia's tourism authorities have deepened their ties with Hollywood after the long tail of Game of Thrones, according to industry roundups of the trend. The logic is simple. If a production is going to reshape your visitor numbers anyway, you would rather help steer where those visitors land. The list of places remade by film and television now runs from Romanian castles to Icelandic glaciers, and few of them got there by accident.

The flip side: when the spotlight becomes a flood

There is a darker version of this story, and it is becoming impossible to separate from the boom. When a small place gets cast in a global hit, the crowds that follow can overwhelm it. Dubrovnik, the walled Croatian city that stood in for King's Landing, has a population of just over 41,000 and was drawing close to 1.5 million tourists a year before the latest surge, roughly 36 visitors for every resident, with tour buses choking the old town and locals priced out of the center.

The pattern repeats across the map. The Austrian village of Hallstatt, often linked to the look of Frozen, and the Sicilian hill town of Taormina, transformed by an earlier season of The White Lotus, have both wrestled with crowds far larger than their streets were built to hold, prompting warnings about overtourism and environmental strain. Thailand offers the cautionary tale that started it all: Maya Bay, made famous by the 2000 film The Beach, drew such damaging crowds that authorities eventually closed it to visitors for years so the reef could recover.

How to set-jet without wrecking the set

The trend is not going anywhere, so the better question is how to do it well. A few habits go a long way. Travel in the shoulder season, when the location is just as photogenic and the crowds have thinned. Look past the single hero shot and explore the surrounding region, since the area that hosted a production usually has lesser-known towns absorbing none of the attention. Spend money locally rather than only at the headline resort, and follow the rules that fragile places like beaches and protected parks put in place, because those restrictions are often the reason the scenery survived long enough to be filmed at all.

Set-jetting works because a great story makes a place feel like somewhere you belong. The travelers who keep that feeling alive will be the ones who treat the destination as more than a backdrop, and who leave it in good enough shape for the next season to be filmed there too.