[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

Set-Jetting Is Why Your Next Trip Will Be a TV Show's Filming Location (Whether You Like It or Not)

Set-jetting — booking trips to film and TV locations — is now quietly steering where millions of us go. I'll tell you which screen destinations are genuinely worth it in 2026 and which are tourist traps wearing a famous backdrop.

Set-jetting filming locations 2026 might be the most powerful force in travel right now that nobody voted for, and I mean that — your next trip is increasingly likely to be somewhere a streaming show was shot, whether you consciously chose it or the algorithm chose it for you.

Set-jetting is just the clunky industry word for booking a trip because you saw the place on screen. And it has gone from a niche thing fans did to a genuine engine of where the masses go. A single hit season can double a region’s bookings in weeks. I’ve watched it happen in real time, and I’ve watched what it does to the places on the receiving end — some thrive, some get quietly wrecked.

Let me be your slightly cynical guide through it.

Here’s the pattern, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. A show drops. A specific location gets a few gorgeous, lingering shots. Within a month the search volume for that town spikes 300%, the one good hotel sells out for the season, and the local council either celebrates or panics, sometimes both.

I was in Taormina, Sicily, the summer after a certain prestige show put it on every screen. The town has been gorgeous for two thousand years — Greeks, Romans, Goethe, the lot — but suddenly there were lines, actual queues, to photograph a hotel terrace. Locals I spoke to were torn. The money was real and welcome. So was the sense that something had shifted, that the town was now performing a version of itself.

That’s the set-jetting bargain in a sentence. Fame brings cash and crowds, and the crowds change the thing the cameras loved in the first place.

I’ll give you the ones I think survive the hype, because they were brilliant before the cameras and the screen fame is just a nudge, not the whole reason.

Sicily (Taormina and beyond). Yes it’s busy now. But go in May or October, get out of Taormina itself to Noto, Ortigia, and Modica, and you’ve got Baroque towns, granita for breakfast, and a coastline that earns every wide shot. The show was right about Sicily. Sicily just doesn’t need the show.

The Cotswolds, England. Endlessly filmed, for good reason — honey-stone villages, proper pubs, walking paths between them. The trick is skipping the famous-on-Instagram village (you know the one, the bridge, the crowds) and basing yourself somewhere like Winchcombe or Stow’s quieter lanes. The screen-famous spots are a tenth of what’s there.

Dubrovnik, off-season. The dragon show fame nearly broke it — at peak, the old town hits crush levels that are honestly miserable. But in November, with the cruise ships gone, it’s a different city: empty walls to walk, soft light, a third of the price. Same backdrop, none of the misery.

Now the ones I’d gently steer you away from, or at least tell you the truth about.

The single-scene pilgrimage. A show shoots one dramatic moment at, say, a particular beach or a lone tree or a tiny chapel, and suddenly thousands of people drive hours to stand at a spot that is, stripped of the music and the editing, just… a place. Often a small, fragile place now ringed by parked cars and a portable toilet. The Skellig Islands after a certain space saga, certain New Zealand fields — the reality rarely matches the fifteen seconds that drew you. You photograph it, feel oddly flat, and drive back.

The strangled town. Some places have been genuinely harmed. Tiny villages with one road and no infrastructure for thousands of daily visitors, where locals have put up signs begging tourists to be quiet and leave, where the community is now in open conflict with its own fame. Going there to recreate a screenshot, frankly, makes you part of the problem. I’d skip those entirely, and I say that as someone whose whole job is encouraging travel.

And the manufactured one. Watch for destinations that lean so hard into screen tourism that they become theme-park versions of themselves — the gift shop selling show merch, the “official” tour bus, the staged photo points. At that stage you’re not visiting a place, you’re visiting a marketing campaign.

If a show makes you want to go somewhere — and that’s a perfectly good reason, I’ve done it myself, no shame — just travel like a grown-up about it. Off-season. Overnight. Spend money with locals, not just at the photo spot. Go beyond the one famous frame and actually explore the wider region, which is almost always better than the single shot that lured you. And read the room: if a place is visibly buckling and the locals are pleading, listen, and go somewhere that wants you instead.

The deeper truth is that set-jetting isn’t going anywhere — the streaming machine will keep minting new must-go locations faster than any of us can keep up, and 2026 will bring a fresh crop the moment the next big season lands. The places don’t get a say. You do. You get to decide whether you show up as a respectful guest or as one more person turning a real town into a backdrop.

So watch the show. Get inspired. Just remember the place existed long before the cameras and has to keep existing long after they leave.

See the location, sure — but go at dawn, stay the night, spend local, and never make a fragile little place pay for fifteen seconds of screen time.

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