A lot of people don’t pick a destination anymore.

They pick a feeling.

Or a scene.

Or a sentence they underlined three years ago in a paperback on a rainy Sunday.

That is a big part of what’s happening in travel right now.

In 2026, two trends that sound niche at first glance have quietly moved into the mainstream: set-jetting and literary travel. Set-jetting is travel inspired by film and television. Literary travel is travel inspired by books, authors, and fictional worlds. And both are growing because people are increasingly booking trips through the lens of story, not just price or weather.

That makes perfect sense to me.

The pandemic years trained people to form emotional relationships with places they hadn’t visited yet. They watched shows obsessively. They read more. They built mental geographies before they ever opened Skyscanner. Then the world reopened, and those imagined places were sitting there waiting to be turned into plane tickets. Odysseys Unlimited explicitly points to pandemic-era binge-watching and reading as part of the fuel behind the rise, and broader 2026 travel reporting is saying the same thing.

And this isn’t just a cute social-media habit anymore. Expedia’s 2026 set-jetting forecast says the trend could become an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone, with 53% of travelers saying their desire to take a set-jetting trip has increased. Among Gen Z and Millennial travelers, Expedia says 81% now plan vacations around places they’ve seen in film or television.

That is not a fringe behavior.

That is a serious demand signal.

At first, set-jetting sounds like something shallow. You see a castle in a Netflix series, you book a trip, you take a photo, you leave.

Sometimes, sure.

But at its best, this trend is doing something more interesting.

It’s giving people a cultural doorway into places they might otherwise overlook.

Dubrovnik becomes more than a Croatian coastal city because a generation recognizes it as King’s Landing. New Zealand stops being a “someday” destination and becomes emotionally legible because people already feel like they’ve traveled its hills and mountains through The Lord of the Rings. Bath feels more vivid when period drama fans arrive already primed for Regency architecture and ritual. Thailand gets another layer of demand when a prestige show turns a hotel backdrop into a fantasy.

The same thing is happening with literary travel.

People aren’t just going to “England.” They’re going to Shakespeare country. They’re going to Beatrix Potter country. They’re going to Haworth for the Brontës, Dublin for Joyce, Edinburgh for book festivals and literary atmosphere, and Verona because fiction turned a city into a permanent emotional reference point.

That’s the key shift.

Travel is becoming more narrative-driven.

People want to feel like they are stepping into something they already know — not because they’ve been there, but because culture got there first.

The more surprising side of this trend, at least to me, is literary travel.

Movie-inspired travel I get instantly. It’s visual. It’s algorithm-friendly. It fits social media perfectly.

Book-inspired travel feels quieter.

But that’s also exactly why it’s growing.

A lot of travelers are tired of traveling for optics. They want trips that feel slower, more meaningful, and less like they were assembled by an influencer with a drone. That makes literary travel incredibly well-timed. Expedia’s 2026 trends even carved out a specific “Readaways” category for book-inspired escapes and reading-centered retreats.

You can see the same shift in the rise of reading retreats and book-centered travel weekends, which are increasingly attracting younger travelers who want community, calm, and culture instead of another loud, interchangeable city break.

And at the institutional level, books are getting more tourism power too. UNESCO designated Rabat as the World Book Capital for 2026, with celebrations beginning on April 23, 2026. UNESCO selected the Moroccan capital in part for its commitment to literacy, publishing, and reading culture. Even more interesting for Colombia, UNESCO has already designated Medellín as World Book Capital for 2027, which gives literary travelers a very real reason to start paying attention to Colombia through a book-and-culture lens, not just an expat or digital nomad one.

That matters because literary travel doesn’t always create the same instant pressure as viral screen tourism. It often sends people deeper into a city, into museums, bookstores, walking tours, festivals, archives, and smaller regional circuits. In other words, it can spread spending more intelligently.

That doesn’t make it automatically virtuous, but it does make it interesting.

Now for the part nobody wants to say out loud:

Not all set-jetting ages well.

Some of it produces great trips. Some of it produces a line.

That’s the risk when a destination goes viral through one scene, one show, or one social platform. The place becomes flattened into a photo objective. People arrive trying to recreate a frame instead of encounter a destination.

You can already see the downside of this in 2026 reporting around cultural travel and social-media-driven demand. The same forces that make set-jetting powerful — fandom, streaming, algorithmic repetition — can also concentrate tourists in the same small pockets over and over again.

So if you’re going to do this trend well, the trick is not to follow the plot literally.

Follow the atmosphere.

If a show made you crave Sicily, don’t just go hunt one filming location and call it done. Build a trip around what the show awakened in you — coastal beauty, layered history, great food, heat, drama, architecture, mood. If a novel made you want Yorkshire, don’t just take one photo on a moor and leave. Let the book become an entry point into the region’s landscape, weather, villages, and literary ecosystem.

That’s the difference between story-inspired travel and content-chasing.

One leads to a trip you remember.

The other leads to a post you forget.

If you want the practical version, these are the places that keep showing up in the 2026 conversation around set-jetting and literary travel:

Dubrovnik, Croatia remains a classic for screen tourism thanks to Game of Thrones, but it also now serves as a lesson in what happens when one identity overwhelms a place if you’re not careful.

New Zealand is still the gold standard for fantasy set-jetting because The Lord of the Rings did something rare: it permanently fused landscape and mythology in the public imagination.

Bath and broader England continue to benefit from period-drama tourism and literary heritage, whether people arrive through Austen, Shakespeare, Beatrix Potter, or newer screen adaptations. 2026 trend coverage also points to a fresh wave of period-drama set-jetting tied to new adaptations.

Thailand is getting a fresh push as a set-jetting destination thanks to prestige television and luxury-screen fantasy, especially for travelers mixing aspirational hospitality with pop culture.

Rabat, Morocco is one of the more intellectually interesting literary destinations for 2026 because of its World Book Capital status, active publishing culture, and year-long program positioning books as part of the city’s identity.

And then there’s a sleeper trend I really like:

Literary regions, not just literary cities. One example is the emerging effort in the Irish borderlands to create a UNESCO “region of literature,” built around themed literary routes and writers tied to places that tourists often skip. That feels much more like the future to me — book travel spreading people outward instead of just funneling them into the same old capitals.

If you’re reading The Passport, you’re probably not the kind of traveler who wants to stand in a selfie line for two hours just because a show used a staircase once.

But you are probably the kind of traveler who cares about context.

That’s why this trend matters.

Set-jetting and literary travel are both really about preloaded context. They give people a reason to care before they arrive. That can be a huge asset if you use it properly.

It also makes these trends especially relevant to expats and long-stay travelers.

Why?

Because the best version of this trend isn’t a rushed vacation. It’s a layered stay.

A month in England where you can mix literary day trips with normal life.

A season in New Zealand where screen landscapes become hiking trails instead of checklist items.

A slower stay in Croatia or Morocco where you can go beyond the obvious and let the original story lead you into the real place.

That’s where the value is.

The screen got you interested.

The book gave you the mood.

But the actual trip still has to be built by you.

The bigger story here is not just that people are traveling because of shows and books.

The bigger story is that travel in 2026 is getting more emotionally coded.

People are not just asking:

Where is it cheap?

Where is it warm?

Where is it pretty?

They’re also asking:

What kind of life does this place let me imagine?

What story does it connect me to?

What mood am I trying to step into?

That’s a very different planning instinct.

And honestly, it’s probably a healthier one than the old checklist model.

Because if you travel through story, you’re less likely to arrive empty.

You already care about something.

You already have a thread to pull.

The only caution is this:

Don’t confuse the story that got you there with the place itself.

That’s where disappointment happens.

A destination is never just the version you watched, read, or imagined.

It’s more complicated than that.

Usually better.

Sometimes messier.

Always more real.

And that’s exactly why it’s worth going.

Set-jetting and literary travel are growing in 2026 because people don’t just want trips anymore.

They want entry points.

They want resonance.

They want context.

They want travel that feels less random and more remembered.

A film can do that.

A novel can do that.

A city with a literary identity can do that.

A landscape attached to a fictional world can do that.

Just don’t stop at the reference.

Go deeper than the scene.

Go further than the quote.

Use the story as the spark, not the whole itinerary.

That’s when a trend becomes a real trip.