You are not going to Dubrovnik. You are going to King’s Landing
Set jetting — traveling to locations where films and television series were shot — is the fastest-growing category in travel. The question is what that means for the place.
At 6:30 in the morning, before the cruise ships have docked and the tour groups have assembled, a woman stands on the limestone-paved Stradun in Dubrovnik’s old town, her phone held up at eye level. She is comparing the frame on her screen with the street in front of her. The frame is from Game of Thrones Season 2: the establishing shot of King’s Landing that she has memorized over eight seasons of television. The street is Dubrovnik’s Stradun, a medieval commercial thoroughfare that has been the social spine of this city since the 13th century.
She has not come to Dubrovnik. She has come to King’s Landing. The distinction matters more than it appears.
Dubrovnik’s old-town population fell from 5,000 residents in 1991 to approximately 1,500 in 2024, largely due to tourism-driven accommodation conversions. Between 2012 and 2015, 244,415 tourists visited specifically because of Game of Thrones, spending 126 million euros. In 2019, 1.4 million visitors arrived in a city of 41,000 people. UNESCO issued a warning that the World Heritage site could not handle the volume. None of this was the production’s intention. All of it was the consequence.
THE BEHAVIOR IS NOT NEW
Set jetting is described as a contemporary phenomenon driven by streaming platforms, social media, and the algorithmic amplification of visual content. The behavior it describes is approximately three centuries old.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, wealthy young men from Northern Europe undertook the Grand Tour — a multiyear journey through France, Italy, and eventually Greece — as the culmination of an education built almost entirely on classical texts. They had studied Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. They had read Cicero’s letters from Rome and Plato’s descriptions of Athens. For a long time, encounters with classical antiquity were only possible through texts. The Grand Tour was the moment when the text became a place: the opportunity to walk around buildings they had only read about, to stand in front of ruins they had only seen described.
The Grand Tourist arriving in Rome in 1740 was doing exactly what the Game of Thrones tourist is doing in Dubrovnik in 2026: arriving at a place whose primary significance had been established by a representation rather than by direct experience. In the 18th century, representation was literary. Today it is cinematic. The behavior — traveling to verify and inhabit a pre-existing image — is identical.
What is new is not the behavior. What is new is the scale, the speed, and the precision of the visual reference. The Grand Tourist arrived in Rome with a text-based image of the Forum. The set jetter arrives in Dubrovnik with eight seasons of high-definition television memorized in specific frames.
WHAT THE CAMERA DOES TO A PLACE
The camera does something to a place that a literary description cannot: it fixes a specific visual frame as the authoritative version of the place. Virgil’s description of Rome produces an image in the reader’s mind that is modified and enriched by everything else they have read about Rome. The establishing shot of King’s Landing produces a specific frame — a specific angle, a specific light, a specific arrangement of the walls and the sea — that becomes the version of Dubrovnik that the set jetter is traveling to inhabit.
This is why set jetters hold their phones up to compare the frame. They are not looking for a resemblance. They are looking for an exact match. The production has established the canonical image, and the traveler’s purpose is to stand inside it. The city behind the frame — the medieval commercial city, the UNESCO heritage site, the place where 1,500 people still live in the old town trying to buy groceries and get their children to school — is scenery. It is the backdrop against which the frame was originally captured and against which the traveler is now capturing their own version.
Dubrovnik’s city authorities have spent significant resources managing the tension this creates. The old town now has visitor caps during peak hours. In 2019, cruise ship arrivals were limited to two per day, with no more than 4,000 passengers each. The limestone of the Stradun, worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic, is being worn faster by the specific concentration of tourism that sets jetting accelerates. The city that was filmed is being consumed by the filming.
THE GAP BETWEEN THE FRAME AND THE PLACE
The set jetter who arrives with the King’s Landing frame memorized will find a version of it. The walls are there. The harbor is there. The specific angle from the ramparts that the production used for the wide establishing shot can be found and photographed. What cannot be found is King’s Landing. It was a fictional city. It was also, in a more specific sense, a version of Dubrovnik that existed in a particular light at a specific time of day, with a production design team that had removed signage, controlled crowd density, and adjusted the visual environment for the camera.
The traveler who arrives without the frame is more likely to find Dubrovnik. The old town before 8 am in May, when the cruise ships have not yet docked, and the tour groups have not yet assembled, is the Dubrovnik that the production team found appealing enough to use — the medieval city doing what medieval cities do in the early morning, at a density and a pace that the afternoon tourist experience does not provide. The Dubrovnik that Game of Thrones was drawn to was a specific version of the city at a specific time of day. The set jetter who goes looking for it at 11 am in August will not find it.
The frame is not the place. It is the most interesting version of the place at the moment the camera was there. The set jetter who understands this is looking for that moment rather than for that frame. Those are different things, and the second one is actually achievable.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR HOW YOU TRAVEL
Set jetting is not a lesser form of travel. The desire to inhabit a story in the place where it was told is as old as travel itself. The pilgrim going to Canterbury was doing it. The Grand Tourist going to Rome was doing it. The Game of Thrones tourist going to Dubrovnik is doing it. The behavior demonstrates that narrative gives places meaning before we arrive — that the stories told about a place are part of what makes it worth visiting.
The question is whether the traveler who arrives with the frame in mind is also available to the place that surrounds the frame. Dubrovnik is not only about the walls. It is a city with a specific history of being a maritime republic, of resisting the Ottoman Empire for centuries while trading with it, and of the 1667 earthquake that destroyed most of the medieval city and produced the Baroque reconstruction that the production team found so visually useful. None of that history is in the frame. All of it is in the city, available to the traveler who puts the phone down after finding the angle and then looks around at what else is there.
The traveler who set jets and then stays is the best possible outcome of the phenomenon. The traveler who set jets and leaves — who arrives, finds the frame, photographs themselves inside it, and departs — is what the city authorities in Dubrovnik, Venice, and Kyoto are trying to manage. The difference between those two travelers is not the frame they arrived with. It is what they did after they found it.
The Grand Tourist arrived in Rome having read about it for twenty years. The reading made Rome more significant, not less. What was required was the willingness to let Rome be more than the reading described. Set jetting requires the same thing.
THE PLACES WORTH SET JETTING TO
The set jetting destinations that reward the traveler who stays are the ones where the production chose the location for reasons that survive the production. Game of Thrones chose Dubrovnik because the walls are real and the harbor is genuinely beautiful, and the medieval city is genuinely intact. Those qualities exist independently of the production. The traveler who set jets to Dubrovnik and then lets the city be Dubrovnik will find something worth the journey.
The set jetting destinations that do not reward the traveler who stays are the ones where the production chose the location as a visual stand-in for somewhere else. Many productions film in locations whose primary appeal to the production is that they resemble a different, more expensive, or logistically difficult location. A Bulgarian city standing in for 19th-century London, a Moroccan medina standing in for a fictional Middle Eastern setting, and a New Zealand landscape standing in for a fantasy world with no geographic referent. The traveler who set jets to these locations will find a place that the production used instrumentally — as a surface rather than as a subject. The surface may be interesting. It is rarely interesting for the reasons the production used it.
The most rewarding set jetting destinations are the ones where the production and the place are genuinely the same thing: where the film was drawn to the location because the location is what the story is about. The Amalfi Coast in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Rajasthani palaces in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The Kyoto temples in Lost in Translation. In each case, the place is not the backdrop. It is the argument. The story could not have been told anywhere else. The set jetter who arrives at these locations finds not only the frame but the reason the frame was worth making.
