Ever been so inspired by a movie scene’s gorgeous backdrop that you simply had to plan a trip to see it for yourself? Well, you’re not alone. According to Spin Genie, an online gambling website out of Canada, millions of people are searching for exact destinations from their favorite movies, so they too can plot out a scene-stealing getaway.
To figure out which film destinations people wanted to see most, the team began by creating a list of what it believed to be the most iconic film destinations across the globe, using sources like Rough Guides, Delicious, and even a few stories by us here at Travel + Leisure. It then used Instagram to search each location’s hashtag, noting how many times the location was mentioned, and conducted the same search on TikTok. (The team collected the data from both sites on Aug. 31, 2023, so the number of posts may have gone up since then.)
It used Google Keyword Planner to find how many times each location had been searched for around the world between August 2022 and July 2023. It also used Kayak to find the average price of a hotel near or in each location per night. It then ranked each location using all four factors, giving every spot a normalized score from one to 10.
After all that hard work, Petra, Jordan came out as the film location that people are searching for the most across the internet, with the team dubbing it the “most iconic film location across the globe.”
“The famous archaeological site is most well-known for appearing in the third Indiana Jones film, ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,’” the findings shared. “Petra is featured in over 1.7 million Instagram posts and has been viewed on TikTok over 1.1 billion times, as well as receiving over 10.4 million searches on Google between August 2022 and July 2023.”
So, how much will it cost to visit? According to the research, the average nearby hotel is about $72 per night.
The second most searched-for filming location went to Salzburg, Austria, with more than 9 million Google searches, more than 3.7 Instagram mentions, and a whopping one billion TikTok mentions — and this could all be thanks to its famous appearance in “The Sound of Music.” Hotels here, the findings reported, average $183 per night.
And coming in third for the most Googled film locations is Oxford University, with nearly eight million searches thanks to its appearances throughout the Harry Potter franchise. Hotels here are a bit more expensive, averaging $261 per night.
Want to see where your favorite filming location stands in terms of Google searches, social media popularity, or nightly price? See all the findings from the report at spingenie.ca.