52 FILM-INDUCED TOURISM – Contributions by Anna Irimiás
52 FILM-INDUCED TOURISM – Contributions by Anna Irimiás
Stories have always been my passion. I have been an avid reader ever since I can remember, and I have always loved being transported into imaginary worlds and experiencing different lives and periods of history through stories. As a movie-aficionado, I chose a high school where I could learn about theories of mass communication, the history of cinema and practical skills such as video making and editing. For personal reasons, I went on to university in Sicily (Italy) a well-known film tourism destination, of course, where I continued to study literature and languages and completed my PhD in human geography. Not a linear career towards business management, you could say. To be honest, I had no intention of doing tourism research until I met my mentor (one of my best friends) Gábor Michalkó. He gave me several opportunities to explore the interconnections between art, place and tourism. Since then, my academic career has largely focused on the ways in which media productions influence tourist behaviour.
I strongly believe that the arts reveal the complexity of the human psyche. Novelists and film directors, in very different ways to marketing experts, can capture the psychological nuances of behaviour. This belief has been the engine of my work. My approach has been influenced by a commitment to bring new insights into the field of tourism building on my cross-disciplinary background. Over the last 15 years, I have published a range of studies exploring how tourism marketing research can benefit from arts-based approaches and how mass- and social media impacts tourists’ behaviour and destination marketing (Irimiás, 2012; 2015a; 2015b; Irimiás and Mitev, 2021).
Film tourism is a tourist activity induced by the viewing of films, TV series and, more recently, digital media (Beeton, 2016). Its study is cross-disciplinary in both scope and subject matter. I employ surveys, interviews, participant observation, social media analysis, netnography and visual methods to investigate how to frame and conceptualise value creation for tourists. With my background in geography, one of the questions that most fascinated me has been how tourism destinations leverage on the interconnections between fictional stories, symbolic marking and film tourism. My most important contributions to the research field are, I believe, the following:
Tourists attribute diverse meanings to mediatized places and the fact that they have been immersed in a story influences their travel decision-taking
Our study, designed to explore the benefits of narrative transportation as a kind of travel-experience in a fantasy world, showed that watching TV series is a form of escapism (Irimiás, Mitev and Michalkó, 2021a). We operationalized narrative transportation theory to link this phenomenon to tourism. This helped us to define the different stages at which tourism marketers and planners can build a marketing or a demarketing strategy to