Saw It on Screen, Booked the Trip: The Places Movies and TV Are Sending Travelers in 2026

A film opened on February 13. Six weeks later, Yorkshire travel searches were up 60 percent.

Expedia Group published the data in May, comparing accommodation searches for 2026 travel with the equivalent periods a year earlier. Yorkshire is also running 35 percent ahead of last summer. These are searches, not arrivals, and the distinction matters, but the movement is measured rather than projected.

The Numbers Nobody Expected

The largest lift in the data did not come from a film at all. Heated Rivalry, a hockey drama, sent searches for Muskoka, Ontario up 110 percent after its debut. Boston rose 85 percent, Montreal 65 percent, and Toronto 55 percent.

Rome climbed 35 percent in the two months after the fifth season of Emily in Paris. Yorkshire’s 60 percent increase sits in the middle of the group, but unlike Rome or Boston, its jump followed a film explicitly built around the landscape itself.

A Separate Dataset Found the Same Thing

Bokun, a Tripadvisor company, ran Google search analysis in the week after Wuthering Heights opened and found searches for the film’s filming locations up 5,000 percent over 30 days. Searches for “where is Wuthering Heights set” rose 236 percent, and Yorkshire Moors searches rose 64 percent.

The locations behind those numbers are specific: Arkengarthdale, Low Row, and Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales, and the moors around Haworth.

Samuel Jefferies, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Bokun, said the influence of pop culture on tourism “continues to shape travel trends globally.”

What It Actually Takes to Go

Of the overseas destinations on the list, Yorkshire is one of the easier trips for American travelers to act on. There is no language barrier, and major U.S. gateways have direct service to London and other British airports. U.S. visitors do, however, need a UK Electronic Travel Authorisation before traveling, which costs 20 pounds and covers stays of up to six months.

Fast trains connect London with Yorkshire in roughly two to three hours, though reaching many of the Dales filming locations requires onward travel by car, bus, or local rail.

The Canadian and American entries are simpler still. Muskoka, Boston, Montreal, and Toronto carry the four largest search increases in the Expedia data and require no ocean crossing at all. Rome is the outlier in the other direction: the smallest lift on the list, and a destination that was already crowded before anyone streamed anything.

What the Search Data Cannot Tell You

A search is not a booking. The Bokun 5,000 percent figure is a seven-day spike measured off a small base, which is how percentage increases in search data usually work, and it describes interest rather than arrivals.

Expedia’s own $8 billion projection for screen-driven travel in the United States is modeled, not measured. The company derives it from the 13 percent of American travelers who say they have booked a trip after seeing a location on screen, roughly a quarter of whom spent between $1,000 and $2,000, extrapolated across the adult population. Its underlying survey covered 24,000 adults across 18 countries through the research firm OnePoll.

What the measured search data does show is where interest moved and when, and in Yorkshire, the movement happened within weeks of the film arriving in theaters.

References: Expedia Group Newsroom | Expedia Group Newsroom | TravelDailyNews | GOV.UK