When I travel by plane, I often board with up to a week’s worth of newspapers. Yes, I still enjoy getting my news the old-fashioned way. In fact, I subscribe to both the Denver and the Colorado Springs dailies, so sometimes that means walking down the aisle pulling my wheelie-suitcase, juggling a cup of java and squeezing a dozen-ish newspapers under one arm. I’m sure I’m quite a sight.
Well, I recently got back from a trip and I did something I rarely do: I perused the in-flight magazine. It’s not something typically on my travel agenda. But I boarded with only four newspapers from my hotel, and I figured that once I’d run out of reading material, I’d watch the portable DVD player I brought along. But silly me! I didn’t charge the player. So, like many folks who don’t bring along reading material (or enough reading material), I picked up the dreaded in-flight mag. Yes, I was very bored!
But I’m glad I did. In this month’s United Airlines Hemispheres, there were six blurbs about how certain movies increased tourism. For instance:
The 1993 World War II drama Schindler’s List brought such an influx of visitors to the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, Poland, that the city turned Oskar Schindler’s factory into a museum to accommodate them.
Deliverance, the 1972 film set in the north Georgia woods, attracted 20,000 visitors to the area in the year after its release and helped created a $20 million rafting and outdoor sports industry along the Chattooga River.
The 2000 dystopian youth drama The Beach is a welter of shark attacks, self-harm and gun-toting drug lords. Nevertheless, in the year after its release, the film fueled a 22 percent rise in visitors to the Thai island where it was filmed, Koh Phi Phi.
I found these factoids most fascinating! I was aware that the Lord of the Rings trilogy had produced a marked increase in New Zealand vacationing. But if asked about the link between film and plane tickets, that would have been as far as I could go.
As I read this page in United’s periodical, I couldn’t help but think how no one will question the coupling of motion pictures-then-travel. This inflight mag’s writer (not credited) may have helped his/her readers (bored folks like me) better understand the power of media. Thanks, Mr./Ms. anonymous writer!
I can’t think of a single film that has caused me to log on to Travelocity or Orbitz—although a book once did the trick. But what about you? What place have you visited that was prompted by a movie (or TV show) that you watched?
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