Set-jetting is the travel trend named after the practice of choosing your destination because you saw it on screen. Per Expedia's 2025 traveller report, 66% of travellers say they've been inspired to visit a destination specifically because of a show or film. Two-thirds of all travellers. Set-jetting isn't a niche; it's most of modern destination choice. Noovo's Start with Where pillar is the natural entry point: the show puts the destination in your head, and the app pulls the friends and dates around it.
The market scale matches. Per 2025 tourism market analysis, screen-tourism spending reached $66B in 2025 and is projected to hit $145B by 2035, an 8.2% compound annual growth rate. Specific shows move the needle hard: Emily in Paris drove a +200% spike in Paris bookings from US travellers in the seasons immediately following the show's release. Dubrovnik attributed £18.2M of 2024 tourism revenue directly to ongoing Game of Thrones screen-tourism, more than a decade after the show premiered.
The 2026 set-jetting hit list
The destinations leading 2026 set-jetting interest:
- Sicily, for White Lotus Season 3. Taormina and the San Domenico Palace specifically. Bookings at the actual hotel are sold out for most of 2026.
- Jeju Island, for Squid Game. The South Korean island is having its biggest international tourism year on record.
- Dubrovnik, for Game of Thrones, still. A decade-old show, still driving 2026 bookings.
- Kyoto, for Shogun. Japan was already overtouristed; Shogun added a 30-something prestige-TV demographic on top.
- Bangkok, for White Lotus and the recent travel-influencer wave. The Mandarin Oriental and a list of specific street-food spots.
- Paris, for Emily in Paris. Still the most over-determined screen-tourism city in the world.
Why set-jetting is unusually group-friendly
Here's the thing that makes set-jetting different from other destination trends. Most destination choices in a group of four involve at least one friend who has no opinion. Set-jetting destinations, by definition, have a shared reference. Everyone in the group has either seen the show or knows what it's about. The destination already has narrative weight before the trip is even proposed.
This collapses the conversation from "where should we go" to "are we doing the White Lotus trip." A binary question with a binary answer. The group commits faster because the destination is doing most of the persuasion work.
The coordination tax is still real
The flip side: a set-jetting destination is in everyone's head, which means it's also on everyone's "we should do that" list. The trip that doesn't happen is the one where four friends each separately watched the show, each thought "we should go," each waited for someone else to propose the dates, and the moment passed.
The fix is mechanical, not motivational. Somebody has to name a week and a destination simultaneously. "Sicily, week of October 12th, who's in" beats "we should do a White Lotus trip" by an enormous margin. The first is a question with a yes/no answer. The second is a daydream that fades.
The Start with Where shortcut
Set-jetting is the cleanest fit for Noovo's Start with Where flow. Pick the destination (Taormina, Jeju, Dubrovnik). The map shows you which of your friends are already planning to be there or nearby. The timeline shows you when the overlap is densest. You create the trip from the map, pre-filled with destination and suggested dates, and send the invite.
The friends who get the invite don't see "you've been invited to a trip." They see: Sam is going to Sicily October 12-19 and tagged you. Are you in? A direct question, with a direct answer, anchored to a place everyone in the chat has already been thinking about.
What set-jetting gets wrong, and how to fix it
The risk with a screen-tourism destination is over-curating the trip around the show. Two days of "doing the Emily in Paris locations" is fun. Five days is exhausting and slightly embarrassing. The screen reference should be the spark, not the itinerary.
The trips that work best mix one or two screen-tourism days (the hotel, the famous restaurant, the iconic location) with the rest of the trip being just a normal week in that city. The show got you there. The city is the actual reward.
See you in Taormina.