MyWestworld

Cinematic Travel

Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by Kerry Banks in International

Slumdog Millionaire not only stole the show at the 81st annual Academy Awards, winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture, it is also sure to bring a tourism boost to the city of Mumbai, which had seen a decline in visitors since the November 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 173 people. According to the Annals of Tourism Research, when a location is featured in a successful film, the number of visitors rises by more than 50 per cent over four years. The tourists who make travel plans based on their favourite films are known as “set jetters”–and their numbers are growing. From the thousands of baseball fans that make a pilgrimage to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, to the legions of fantasy buffs who take Lord of the Rings tours of New Zealand, film-inspired travel is one of the hottest trends going.

In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, however, some of the travel spin-offs have sparked controversy. Part of the movie was set in the Dharavi district, Asia’s largest slum, where one million people live in squalor in an area smaller than New York’s Central Park. Mumbai-based Reality Tours and Travel is now offering guided tours of the hellhole. The excursion’s “highlights” include a stop at a stall of six toilets that serves 16,000 people and a stroll alongside a river so black and septic that it oozes rather than flows.

“In India, a lot of people think the movie is poverty porn,” said Reality Tours co-founder Chris Way in a recent interview. But he insists that criticism of his tours, whose sales are up by about 25 percent since Slumdog Millionaire’s release, “comes from misunderstanding what we are trying to do, which is break down the negative image of slums, and highlight the industry and sense of community.” Reality Tours charges $10 or $20 a person, depending on length of the tour, and pledges to donate 80 percent of after-tax profits to local charities.
 
Other tourism operators have begun leading curious, rich Westerners into famous slums, from the townships of Soweto to the favelas of Brazil. “The jury’s still out on whether the tours are perverse invasions of privacy or eye-opening experiences that will prompt action on the poverty agenda,” Christine Bowers, a consultant for the World Bank, said on her blog.

There is no doubt though that popular movies can provide financial bonanzas for savvy marketers. The most striking recent example occurred in New Zealand, the backdrop for The Lord of the Rings, where an intensive tourism campaign spanned the three years of the trilogy’s film releases. The island nation has christened itself “New Zealand: Home of Middle-earth” (the world in which the Rings’ fantasy plays out). Air New Zealand has emblazoned four aircraft with giant images from the films and there is even a government-appointed Minister of the Rings. The payoff? The annual tourist influx to New Zealand has jumped from 1.7 million in 2000 to 2.4 million today–a 40 percent surge–attributed to a large degree to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon, and a big upgrade for New Zealand’s international profile.

Similarily, the Harry Potter movies have inspired tourists with children to visit a variety of locales in Britain where tour companies have organized itineraries that include, if not the actual Diagon Alley or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, then some of the sites that served as those imaginary settings on the big screen. Locations included Gloucester Cathedral (Hogwarts), North Yorkshire Moors Railway (Hogsmeade station) and Alnwick Castle (Hogwarts again). VisitBritain, the tourism body responsible for selling England to the Brits and Britain to the non-Brits, invested heavily in movie tie-ins: 340,000 Harry Potter location maps were printed.

Several British locales featured in The Da Vinci Code, such as Temple Church in London, Burghley House in Lincolnshire, and Rosslyn Chapel, a 15th-century Scottish church (pictured here), found themselves invaded by a wave of fanatical amateur sleuths after the film’s release in May 2006. In fact, the hullabaloo surrounding The Da Vinci Code led to an unprecedented partnership among national tourism agencies in Britain, France and Scotland, who teamed together to showcase locations, destinations and attractions linked with the film. The three agencies developed a tour program called “Seek the Truth” with Sony Pictures, and high-speed rail service Eurostar to offer tourists a chance to “follow in the footsteps of the film’s main characters.

Japan’s tourism industry has gotten a lift from several recent films, including Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai and Memoirs of a Geisha, even though much of the latter was actually shot in California. Meanwhile, several Caribbean islands have capitalized on the box-office success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie trilogy. Tourists in the Bahamas can take a 25-minute boat ride to Blackbeard’s Cay, visit the Pirates of Nassau Museum and see Fort Charlotte’s underground passages and dungeons. St. Lucia has the Brig Unicorn, an authentic 140-foot replica of an 18th century ship which was featured in The Curse of the Black Pearl, while Dominica has Shipwreck Cove and a cruise up Pantano River where the Black Pearl anchored.

Visits to scenic Phi Phi Leh island, near Phuket, Thailand, soared after Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach, was turned into a 2000 film there starring Leonardo DiCaprio, but not everyone was pleased that the film makers had chosen to shine Hollywood’s lights on the uninhabited island. Despite strict conservation laws, the Thai government let the film crew dig up more than half the beach at Maya Bay to plant coconut trees–destroying roots holding the dunes together.

An unexpected monetary windfall was created by Sideways, a modest comedy about two middle-aged men embarking on a wine-tasting tour in California. The 2004 film generated more than 600 media stories highlighting Santa Barbara as a travel destination–the equivalent of $4-million worth of advertising, a major cash injection for what had previously been an overlooked and often ignored part of the California wine business. Businesses in the Santa Barbara area have reported an increase in trade of up to 30 per cent since the film’s release, with wineries on the Sideways’ map receiving a rise of up to 42 per cent.

Although the power of celluloid to spur tourism is now widely recognized, the movie credited with opening people’s eyes to the phenomenon is the 1986 comedy Crocodile Dundee, which became Australia’s highest grossing film ever and made an international star out of unknown actor Paul Hogan. One survey credited the movie with doubling visitor numbers to Queensland in three years. Interestingly, many Australians initially objected to the film, claiming that it confirmed the general image of Australian backwardness and “outback”-ness rather than affirming the image of a modern urban society. Hogan’s response to the criticism was nothing if not direct: “People are so dumb sometimes in Australia. What are we going to do, put a nice sensible hard-working accountant in a film and say: ‘Here’s a typical Australian, hard-working, industrious. Everyone would yawn and say, Never go to Australia.’”

In terms of long-term tourist impact, however, the piece of cinema that can stake a strong claim to being the most successful of all is the all-singing, all-dancing, all-yodelling Hollywood classic The Sound of Music, which was set in Salzburg, Austria. One out of three Japanese have seen it, and it’s what draws 75 per cent of all American tourists to Salzburg. More than 40 years after the film’s release, some 300,000 fans por into the city every 12 months on the strength of the musical, with 40,000 taking the official Sound of Music Tour. Evidently, the hills are alive with the sound of cash registers.

Photo Credits:

#1: boston.com

#2: teako170.com

#3: templars.wordpress.com

#4: thgholidays.com

#5: blog.goethe.de

Tags: Australia, Austria, Beaches, California, England, France, India, Japan, Movie Travel, Mumbai, New Zealand, Scotland, Thailand