Take the Nord-Pas-de-Calais – what a discovery! For a long time, many French people located the region on the far side of the moon and even mistook the language of the inhabitants for a Martian dialect. Until the film “Welcome to the Sch’tis” taught them and an international audience better. Since then, tourism in the structurally weak north of France has experienced a noticeable upswing. In addition to a Sch’ti beer, popular souvenirs are apparently the town signs for the Bergues filming location.
The positive effect of films on tourism is as old as the cinema itself: Heidelberg’s popularity among Americans goes back not least to expressionist silent films, while the musical film “The Sound of Music” has brought visitors from the USA to Salzburg to this day, although he felt that he had already come to the cinemas during Mozart’s lifetime. The fact that the Swiss Alps have played the role of the Himalayas in Bollywood productions for decades makes them attractive to Indian tourists.
In the meantime, the series of streaming services have taken the place of films. Dubrovnik has been overrun since “Game of Thrones” viewers discovered the city in the fantasy saga. In this respect, tourism does not have to worry, despite the corona-related still very critical situation. Because as long as people cannot travel as much as usual, the media libraries look empty. And this series audience of today is tomorrow’s stream of tourists.
This mechanism is already noticeable in France: Both “Emily in Paris” and “Lupine” – both series started during the Corona crisis – attract foreign holidaymakers to their locations. In the capital, a restaurant and a bookstore benefit from this. The seaside resort of Étretat in Normandy, on the other hand, booked so many additional guests that environmentalists are already warning of overloading the nearby chalk cliffs.
Both places are predestined for tourism. But what about in this country? The “Catacombs” series shows neither idyllic cityscapes nor beaches, but the repulsive world beneath Munich’s main train station. Did everything wrong again? Hardly, after all, the city has already done excellently to advertise itself as a place of total crash – thanks be to the Oktoberfest.