Abstract
Student and youth travel is a growing market that is becoming increasingly important to tourism marketers. Film induced tourism is also an upcoming area of tourism often thought attractive by destination marketing organizations. However, research connecting students’ travel behaviour with film induced tourism is lacking.
This project connects those two areas of tourism by focusing on students’ general awareness towards film induced tourism and their experiences with incidental as well as specific film locations encounters. Further, this thesis includes a comparison of students’ interests in different activities related to film induced tourism such as visiting film locations, movie sets, film theme parks, doing movie tours or attending film premieres and film festivals. These topics are examined in general as well as with a focus on two particular popular movie series, namely Harry Potter and Twilight.
Research was done by an online survey in form of a questionnaire including both open and closed ended questions; 52 responses from mainly Austrian and other European students were collected and evaluated.
Regarding the main findings of this project, about 42% of respondents showed an awareness towards film induced tourism due to having come across a film location incidentally during their travels or due to having visited a film theme park. Only approximately 10% of students, however, had specifically sought out a destination because of its movie exposure.
The interest towards film induced tourism among students was very high (85%), with students being particularly interested in film premieres, film festivals and movie set visits. Movie tours, however, had the lowest interest level. Regarding the focus on two different movies in this study, it can be said that students’ interest in film induced tourism depends to a great deal on the movie concerned and the students’ interest in that movie.