Tourist Bump

1308 E 5th St, Metropolis, IL 62960

It is a well-known fact that popular works of fiction can hugely impact people's interest, or lack thereof, in anything featured in said work. Including locations.

Whether the work is set in a real city, set in an entirely fictional one that just happens to share its name with a real city, or just because a real life location heavily inspired the setting for the work, once a work of fiction gains enough of a fanbase, fans will want to visit this place.

A tourism-savvy city can (and often will) take advantage of this to give itself an additional gimmick to lure in tourists. Common tactics include opening a museum dedicated to the work in question, openly using the work in advertisements for the city, or even erecting a statue.

On a smaller scale, this trope can also apply to neighborhoods, streets, or individual buildings; on the opposite end, it can apply to entire states, prefectures, or countries. Sister trope to The Red Stapler and Pet Fad Starter, which are this same phenomenon for objects and animals respectively, and Colbert Bump, which is this trope for people.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• There's a Google Super Bowl ad where people go to places (public and private) they saw in movies.

Anime & Manga

• Banana Fish takes place in New York City, and after the anime adaptation first aired in 2018, tourism company Kinki Nippon Tourist Kanto offered a New York City tour specifically for Banana Fish fans that features locations around the city that were shown in the series itself; they even include a guided audio tour narrated in-character by Ash and Eiji's voice actors Yūma Uchida and Kenji Nojima. The main branch of the New York Public Library, where several scenes take place, is a particularly popular tourist attraction for fans, to the point that the library's gift shop revenue hugely increased during the 2019 fiscal year.
• Bocchi the Rock!: Shimokitazawa, especially the SHELTER live house that STARRY was based on, received an increasing number of visitors making pilgrimages to the locations within the series. However, rowdy behavior from fans caused the official Bocchi website to issue a reminder for fans to behave themselves.
• Bungo Stray Dogs's popularity increased tourism to Yokohama, where the series takes place.
• Asian tourism to Italy increased after fans of Castle in the Sky discovered a village resembling the eponymous location.
• Enoshima, an island off the coast of Kamakura, is a favorite destination among otakus, since it is featured prominently in several popular shows such as Elfen Lied, Sweet Blue Flowers and Uta∽Kata.
• Girls und Panzer: The town of Oorai enjoys this due to the success of the anime. The real life annual Anglerfish festival saw a huge spike in attendees the year after the anime debuted. The massive increase in tourism helped rescue the town's finances in the wake of the 2011 tsunami.
• Heidi, Girl of the Alps has drawn thousands of Japanese pilgrims to the Swiss Alps.
• The real life touge courses in Initial D have become immortalized in real life. Mount Haruna (which is what Mount Akina is based on) often gets many visitors in the Gunma area, and the real tofu shop also gained popularity before it was torn down.
• Japanese zoos saw increase in visitors thanks to Kemono Friends. In particular, the Serval cat, one of the main characters in the series, received a lot of attention. Famously, Tobu Zoo took advantage of this by placing cardboard cutouts of the Friends in their exhibits, and inadvertently created an Internet sensation when a Humboldt penguin named Grape-kun fell in love with a cardboard cutout of Hululu, the character representing his species on the show.
• A small bakery in Tasmania saw a massive surge in international tourism when it was discovered that Kiki's Delivery Service used it as the basis for Osono's bakery.
• Fosse Farmhouse, a hotel in Wiltshire, UK, experienced a surge in tourism from Japan after being featured as the home of Alice Cartelet in Kiniro Mosaic.
• K-On!: Houkago Tea Time's trip to England in the movie has promoted London to a beloved pilgrimage site for anime fans, following the footsteps of the heroines to beloved landmarks such as Big Ben, the London Eye, the Troubabour Cafe in Brompton where they enjoyed a lovely breakfast of eggs benedict (and where The Beatles and Bob Dylan both once performed), 221B Baker Street of Sherlock Holmes fame, and of course, Abbey Road where The Beatles crossed for the eponymous album.
• Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne: The city of Kamogawa explicitly hopes their tourism gets a boost with their being the main city in the series.
• Laid-Back Camp became an unpaid advertisement for camping around Mt. Fuji. Indeed, since the show began, there has been a tripling of camping attendees around the mountain.
• Love Live! features plenty of real locations in Japan, which naturally results in this.
  • Some locations featured in Love Live!, like Kanda Shrine (where Nozomi works as a part-time Miko) and Takemura (the basis for Honoka's house), have become popular tourist sites.
  • Love Live! Sunshine!! saw a surge of visitors to Numazu, the Japanese town in which the anime is set. Marusan Book Store, a real bookstore in Numazu which is depicted in the anime as Hanamaru's favorite bookstore, was a particularly popular tourist spot for fans until its closure on May 31, 2022.
• Lucky Star:
  • The town of Washimiya, Saitama, Japan experienced a massive surge in tourism thanks to the anime, as the Hiiragi family shrine is based on the local Washinomiya shrine. It has since become a pilgrimage site for otaku of all ages, with many prayer plaques featuring weird prayers asking Konata to be their wife.
  • The nearby town of Satte is where Konata and her family lives in the series. The Izumi family (Konata, Sojiro, Kanata, and Yutaka) have been made honorary residents of the town. The series' creator Kagami Yoshimizu lived in Satte when he created Lucky Star, and after he moved out, the city renovated his home into a recreation of the Izumi household.
• Sailor Moon: Hikawa Shrine, where Rei lives and works as a Miko, exists in real life (although there are actually two Hikawa Shrines, and the first anime moved one to the location of the other). It's also a tourist spot for fans. Crown Game Center also used to exist but has since gone out of business and been replaced by a McDonald's.
• Silver Spoon is set at an agricultural high school based on a real one in Hokkaido, whose dairy program more than doubled its number of applicants a couple of years after the series started. Arakawa-sensei even parodied and self-referenced this trivia in a chapter when a teacher informs Aki and Aikawa that the agricultural university they are hoping to attend has tightened their entry criteria because there is a large increase in applications stemming from the popularity of a recent tv drama that was shot at the said university.
• Sound! Euphonium's anime adaptation inspired a minor surge of tourism to Uji in Kyoto, and in particular to Daikichiyama, a small mountain overlooking the city, which is visited in key scenes. Searching up the mountain will bring up results related to the series, and as a promotional tie-in, cardboard character stands are often placed by its observation deck.
• Sound of the Sky: Cuenca, Spain has seen a noticeable increase in Japanese tourism since being featured in this series.
• The town of Takehara's popularity has risen quite a bit since it has been featured in Tamayura, and the town's inhabitants appear to be very proud of that fact. Restaurants and shops advertise with posters from the show (especially the ones actually used as scenery), and one of the local ferries even sports huge posters of the show's main heroines.
• Summer Time Rendering: The popularity of the manga and the anime increased tourism to Wakayama, in particular the port town of Kada and the nearby island of Tomogashima, as fans flocked to locations that were featured in the series. In response, the Wakayama City Tourism Division made Ushio its official Wakayama Anime Tourism Ambassador and promotes the series and its merchandise all over the prefecture.
• Your Name: Itomori's Real Life inspiration, Hida City in Gifu Prefecture, has seen millions in tourist revenue from visiting fans.
• In Yuri!!! on Ice, Yuri Katsuki's hometown of Hasetsu was based on the real city of Karatsu in the Saga prefecture of Kyushu. Tourism to Karatsu exploded thanks to fans of the series wanting to visit, and the city reveled in it, creating merchandise and tours just for them. They even named Yuri the tourism ambassador for the city.
• Zombie Land Saga takes place in Saga Prefecture, and it's frequently lampshaded how obscure the setting is. However, the series has successfully boosted tourism sales in Saga, particularly for Drive-in Tori, which is a real restaurant that the characters help advertise for in the series. Since the Saga prefecture government was part of the production committee, and the in-universe goal of the characters is to stop their corner of Japan from fading into obscurity, it's safe to say that this was invoked.

Comic Books

• Superman: The city of Metropolis, Illinois, happens to share its name with the fictional city the Man of Steel lives in. It doesn't look at all like its The DCU counterpart, which is more a stand-in for New York City (specifically "midtown at noon," according to Kurt Busiek); in fact, it much more closely resembles Clark's equally fictional boyhood home, Smallville. Be that as it may, Metropolis IL takes full advantage of Metropolis DCU. On June 9, 1972, the Illinois State Legislature passed Resolution 572, declaring Metropolis, IL, the "Hometown of Superman". There is a Superman Museum, a 15-foot painted bronze statue of Superman in front of the county courthouse, and every year, on the second weekend of June, the city hosts the annual Superman Celebration, which is attended by fans from all over the world. Additionally, the local newspaper is the Metropolis Planet, there is a statue of Noel Neill as Lois Lane (and a street of that name), and also a commemoration of the real Man of Steele, who also lived there.
• Many Tintin fans have gone to the French castle of Cheverny, because Hergé modeled the castle of Moulinsart/Marlinspike after it. There's even a permanent Tintin exhibition at the castle.

Films — Animation

• Encanto caused a huge surge of tourism to Colombia, where the movie is set.
• Frozen: Tourist visits to Norway spiked up to 34% after the release of the movie, whose lore and setting was inspired by Norwegian culture and geography (even though the source material was written by a Dane). The country now hosts Frozen-themed family holidays to drum up publicity for those who are curious about the film's setting.
• The Simpsons Movie: 20th Century Fox invoked this trope by giving every town in America named Springfield the chance to host the premiere of the movie. The towns had to send in a film to explain why their Springfield was the best choice. The winner was Springfield, Vermont.
• The city of Tybee Island, Georgia received a tourism increase in 2015 after being used as a filming location for the live-action sequences of The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water.

Films — Live-Action

• Back to the Future: According to screenwriter Bob Gale, some people actually went to Puente Hills Mall, the location used for Twin Pines/Lone Pine mall, on the actual October 26, 1985, the present time used in the film, to see if anything would happen.
• The Blair Witch Project: The release caused an increase in tourism to Burkittsville, Maryland much to the annoyance of the locals who found themselves overrun and their town sign which had featured in the film being repeatedly stolen. When the third film was released in 2016 the town pre-emptively took down its welcome signs and blocked off alleys to deter tourists.
• Borat: Strangely, after Sacha Baron Cohen raked them over the coals, the nation of Kazakhstan saw a surge in tourism.
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Many towns in the Mountain West cashed in on their connections to Butch Cassidy in the years after the film became a hit by catering to tourists. In particular, the tiny town of Circleville, Utah made a big deal about having been where Cassidy (or Robert LeRoy Parker, as he was known then) grew up, with his family's old cabin getting restored and put on display.
• Call Me by Your Name: Thanks to the movie's popularity, the filming location Crema, Italy is now a tourist destination.
• Crazy Rich Asians: The popularity brought a tourism boost to Singapore.
• Don Camillo: The Italian town of Brescello, which served as the set for the film series starring Gino Cervi and Fernandel, has statues of both Peppone and Don Camillo with the two actors' likeness on the town square, and dedicated a museum to these two characters, which houses many props from the movies.
• Ghostbusters: Firehouse, Hook & Ladder Company 8 of the New York Fire Department has become a popular tourist attraction for being used as the site of the Ghostbusters base and has their sign on the site. The apartment building at 55 Central Park West aka "Spook Central" is another attraction for being Dana Barrett and Louis Tully's apartment building and Gozer's lair. After the deaths of Harold Ramis (Egon) in 2014 and director Ivan Reitman in 2022, Firehouse, Hook & Ladder Company 8 also served as a memorial site for them.
• James Bond:
  • The name of the mountain-top Piz Gloria revolving restaurant, which features prominently as Blofeld's lair on On Her Majesty's Secret Service, actually comes from Ian Fleming's novel. The restaurant, which was actually still under construction when filming started, retained the name afterwards — even though the name derives from the Romansh language and the restaurant itself is located in the Bernese Oberland which is not a Romansh-speaking area. It has always acknowledged the film's significance to its commercial reputation and has a James Bond exhibition on its lower floor.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun: The island of Khao Phing Kan in Thailand was a seldom-visited indigenous area until it was featured in this film as the site of Scaramanga's island lair. Since then, the island's become a popular tourist attraction to the point that it's commonly called "James Bond Island".
  • Spectre is an interesting example: The Day of the Dead Parade scene attracted tourists to Mexico City who hoped to see it, only to find out that the parade isn't a real thing. Mexico then made it a real thing.
• Night at the Museum: Following the film’s release in 2006, many visitors to the American Museum of Natural History were keen to see the exhibits shown on screen. Unfortunately, many of said exhibits were pure fabrication, or if they did exist in the museum itself, didn’t look nearly the same as their on-screen counterparts.
• Joker: West 167th Street in New York City saw a boost in attention after the release, thanks to the memetic popularity of a scene in which the title character dances on a set of stairs there to "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter. The so-called "Joker stairs" became so popular that they got their own article on Wikipedia, and attracted so many visits from fans that New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to ask them to dial it back for residents' safety.
• The Lord of the Rings: The movies were all shot in New Zealand (and so would be The Hobbit), which quickly became known as 'Home of Middle-earth' following the first movie's release. The country still has many tourist attractions related to the movies. It got to the point that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is not set in the same continuity, was filmed there as well.
• Rocky: The most famous scene where Rocky jogs on the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art became so popular that the stairs was named "Rocky Steps" and a statue of Rocky was placed in his honor.
• Saving Private Ryan caused a surge in tourism in France, particularly from Americans, on the Real Life Normandy beaches where D-Day happened during World War II.
• Star Trek: First Contact: The city of Bozeman, Montana, co-writer Brannon Braga's home, gained greater attention among Star Trek fans as the film stated that this was the place where humans confirmedly made First Contact with an alien species, the Vulcans, on April 5, 2063, also spawning the Trek fan holiday "First Contact Day".
• The Star Wars films The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi: Skellig Michael, a Unesco World Heritage Site off the southwest coast of Ireland, saw tourism skyrocket after it stood in for Ahch-To.
• The Way featured a hotel on the Camino pilgrimage route in Spain, whose management needed considerable persuading to allow its appearance in the film. However, after the film came out, the management had so many visitors inquiring if "The Way" suite was available that they began marketing it as such.

Literature

• Neil Gaiman's book American Gods did wonders for the Wisconsin tourist attraction the House on the Rock, a place so bizarre that fans couldn't actually believe it's real. The book has been credited for attracting scores of young people and keeping the place from fading away. The owners were so grateful for the boost in tourism that when American Gods was adapted into a TV show that they closed it for four days to allow the crew to film there and even allowed them to ride the famous Carousel.
• Anne of Green Gables and its sequels take place in Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest and least-populated province. It's been said that as much as a third of all tourism to PEI is because of the book's popularity; it gets an especially notable number of Japanese tourists due to how beloved the book is there.
• The Bremen Town Musicians: The German city of Bremen is quite proud of this fairy tale. There is a statue of the four animals in their famous pose on the square next to the city hall, and art or references to the fairy tale can be found throughout the city.^note A bit ironic since in the original fairy tale, the four never actually make it to Bremen
• The Count of Monte Cristo is the reason why the Chateau d'If, otherwise a random old prison in the south of France, is popular with tourists.
• The Da Vinci Code increased the popularity of the Louvre in Paris, the Temple Church in London and Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.
• A Dog of Flanders, a British novel set in Belgium that is entirely forgotten in Britain and was never known in Belgium, is hugely popular in Japan, Korea and the Philippines, and has led to Antwerp, the city where the climax is set, becoming a big tourist destination for people from those areas. The Antwerp authorities have erected statues of the novel's characters in Hoboken, the suburb where it's widely argued the main events are set, and outside Antwerp Cathedral, where the protagonist and his dog freeze to death.
• Atami city, Shizuoka prefecture received a tourism boost thanks to Ozaki Kōyō's The Golden Demon, as a result a monument was built of the novel's Signature Scene and celebrations dedicated to the author are held on the day the main couple breaks up (Jan 17).
• Harry Potter:
  • While not the primary setting for the series, Kings Cross Station in London is an important location in the stories, as this is where the Hogwarts Express departs from the secret platform 9¾. The station now features an actual "entrance" to this platform, consisting of a sign and a cart that seems to vanish into the wall. It is a popular tourist attraction and there is also a dedicated Potter shop next to it.
  • Similarly, the West Highland Line, featured as the route of the Hogwarts Express in the films, experienced an increase in tourism, with steam-hauled services added.
• Victor Hugo wrote his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame as part of an effort to save the eponymous cathedral from demolition. He succeeded (and indirectly launched the historic preservation movement in the process), as the public outcry that resulted convinced the French government to reverse course and restore the cathedral instead of tearing it down.
• Lost Horizon: an interesting case involving a non-existent place being turned into a real one. In 1933, James Hilton wrote a book called about a perfect utopia called Shangri-La. When Tibet realized that heavy logging of their old-growth forests was causing disastrous floods, they turned to tourism, found that it paid really well, and renovated a village, renaming it Shangri-La.
• The Railway Series by Rev. Wilbert Awdry; and to a lesser extent the non-fiction book Railway Adventure, both provide this for the Talyllyn Railway in Tywyn, Wales. Railway Adventure is famous for telling the history of the Talyllyn Railway's early years in preservation by then manager LTC Rolt; while The Railway Series fictionalized the Talyllyn into the "Skarloey Railway" which incorporated Ripped from the Headlines events on the line into the fictional island of Sodor. The Railway Series television adaptation Thomas & Friends only exploded this popularity further, and the Talyllyn has fully leaned into hosting events based on the books to bring in visitors. Even better, thanks to a licensing agreement inked with the Awdry family before the television show started; the Talyllyn can hold such events without paying high licensing fees to Mattel and their official "Days Out With Thomas" branding.
• Sherlock Holmes: In the stories, the famous detective resides on 221B Baker Street in London. As of 1990, the real Baker Street features a Sherlock Holmes museum, which was even given the official address of 221B by permission of the City of Westminster.
• The Twilight Saga: The town of Forks, Washington, previously best known as a logging town, saw a 600% increase in tourism in the years of the height of the series' success, nearly all of it due to Forks being the main setting of the story. Tourism peaked in 2010 before settling back down at a rate still higher than before. The town even passed a resolution naming September 13, Bella Swan's birthday, Stephenie Meyer Day (now the Forever Twilight in Forks Festival). There have even been a pair of documentaries, Twilight in Forks and Destination Forks, made about how the town has been affected by this. The Twilight tourism has also rubbed off on neighboring towns, most notably La Push (home of Jacob Black and the Quileute tribe) and Port Angeles (the main town on the Olympic Peninsula, and where several scenes in the book take place).

Live-Action TV

• The Bridge Cafe has gotten significantly more popular after becoming the place the losing team is sent on The Apprentice. Tourists even began visiting after seeing it on the show.
• Bewitched birthed Salem, Massachusetts' witch-centric tourism industry. Before The '70s, Salem treated the witch trials and witchcraft in general as something you did not bring up in polite company (unless you were talking about the Salem High School mascot and sports teams), to the point that Arthur Miller ran into pushback from the locals when he was doing research for The Crucible. Then production on Bewitched filmed a number of episodes there in 1970, which doubled as a history lesson about the miscarriage of justice that went on during the trials. Afterwards, the city embraced its history and became not only a leading Halloween destination, but also the home of one of the world's largest real-life communities of witches and pagans. Today, there is a bronze statue of Samantha Stephens in Lappin Park in downtown Salem, put up by TV Land in 2005.
• Anthony Bourdain often caused a bump in business from non-locals for a restaurant he praised.
• Breaking Bad: Albuquerque, NM received a tourism spike from the show, especially following the acclaimed final two seasons. Pretty interesting, considering the show rather realistically portrays the city's meth-fueled underbelly.
• Tourist demands to visit the safe parts of Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat increased by over 30% in the months that followed the broadcasting of the acclaimed namesake HBO miniseries.
• Port Isaac in Cornwall received a substantial increase in visitors since it doubled as Portwenn, the main setting for Doc Martin.
• Guy Fieri often has a similar impact on the establishments visited in Diners, Drive-ins and Dives — some owners have even stated that they would have gone out of business if not for the attention he brought them.
• Friends: The apartment building at 90 Bedford St in New York City, NY, which was used as the exterior for the main characters' apartments, is a tourist attraction for fans of the show. After Matthew Perry (Chandler) passed away in 2023, it also served as a memorial site for him.
• Game of Thrones heavily boosted tourism in all shooting locations, particularly Spain, Croatia and Northern Ireland.
• Gentleman Jack depicted the life of the real-world Regency-era lesbian Anne Lister, using her home of Shibden Hall in Yorkshire as a filming location. After the broadcast of the series, visits to Shibden Hall, now a public historic site, tripled, leading to an extension of opening hours.
• Oxford has benefitted a lot from the fact that Inspector Morse was filmed there, with much use of Scenery Porn. This, along with the fact that the show had two spin-offs that were just as successful (Lewis and Endeavour) has led to something of a mini-tourist industry in Oxford (a city already on the itineraries of many visitors to Britain thanks to the university) geared towards Morse fans, including themed walks which go to various locations (and pubs) featured in the show. The Randolph Hotel even renamed its bar after Morse.
• Foreign destinations that Michael Palin visits on his BBC shows frequently experience greater tourist numbers.
• Cornwall in general received a boost thanks to Poldark, with fans of the show wanting to visit filming locations and buy postcards depicting Aidan Turner.
• While Peaky Blinders was in fact filmed in Liverpool as the Birmingham areas it is set in have been extensively redeveloped, it has led to a tourist boom for both cities.
• Anywhere visited by Rick Mercer in The Rick Mercer Report tends to experience a tourism boost.
• Tom's Restaurant in New York City was used as an Establishing Shot backdrop for Monk's Cafe, a common setting in Seinfeld. ^note  The word "Tom's" in the restaurant's sign is usually hidden or obscured to maintain the illusion for the viewers. It has become a popular spot for fans of the series, and they proudly note this on their website.
• Sherlock: Speedy's, the restaurant located under Sherlock's flat, is a real place. It has since become a popular place for fans to visit. Some fans have even donated their fan-art, which the owners put on display.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: While most people first heard of Captain Kirk being born in Iowa in the fourth movie in 1986, it was actually first revealed in the book The Making of Star Trek in 1968. In 1985 the town of Riverside asked Gene Roddenberry for official authorization as the future birthplace of Kirk. Now there are many Trek-related attractions in the area, including a big sculpture of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Star Trek: Voyager would later have a similar effect on Bloomington, Indiana, the future birthplace of Captain Janeway.
• Supergirl was set in the U.S. in the fictional National City, but filmed in Vancouver, Canada, but there was interest in areas like Burnaby where they did occasional filming, an area that was previously better known for either being an industrial city or notoriety for the William Bennest pedophile scandal of 1996, which it still has an association with even now, although over time the scandal is fading into obscurity.
• The first episode of 1883, a prequel to Yellowstone, mostly takes place in Fort Worth, Texas, and was filmed primarily around the Fort Worth Stockyards, which still has buildings with "Old West" architectural styles. The city in general and the Stockyards in particular saw a boost in tourism; one restaurant that had a temporary façade put in front of it for filming even decided to keep the façade up for good to draw more attention from fans of the shows. It's ironic, considering the show's portrayal of Fort Worth at the time isn't very flattering.

Music

• The tree featured on the cover of 100 gecs' debut album, 1000 gecs — an evergreen on the perimeter of a manufacturing campus in Des Plaines, IL — has become not only a pilgrimage destination for fans of the band but a physical landmark of the wider hyperpop movement the band is a part of. Following the leaking of the tree's coordinates, visits ensued en masse for fans to take pictures and leave paraphernalia in the spirit of the album (plastic recorders, mini Care Bears toys, acrylic nails, a winged cherub with a Hatsune Miku pin, etc.). Visits reportedly grew so frequent that security guards were enlisted to limit the amount of time people could spend there.
• The zebra crossing featured on the cover of The Beatles' album Abbey Road (i.e. the Abbey Road Crossing) became a tourist attraction, with fans regularly stopping traffic to take photos on it. The Docklands Light Railway station of Abbey Road, nowhere near the location, has pun-laden signs to redirect people.
• The success of David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars brought a lot of extra attention to the K. West furriers building featured on the album cover, becoming a popular tourist attraction and pilgrimage site for Bowie fans. Even though the K. West sign was taken down, a plaque was ultimately put up commemorating the location's significance to British popular culture.
• Winslow, Arizona being a Route 66 town achieved national fame in 1972 because of Eagles' song "Take It Easy" which has the line "standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona". The city decided to capitalize on this to increase tourism after the town's population declined in the late 70s-90s; the town constructed a park on one of its street corners depicting the song's lyrics.
• Sales at Goodwill stores reportedly rose 10% following the release of Macklemore's "Thrift Shop".
• The cover of Pink Floyd's Animals turned the Battersea Power Station into an unlikely landmark. The album's usage of the now-decommissioned power station made it so popular that it wasn't torn down and instead sold off to be made into an apartment complex/entertainment area/bar/office spaces/restaurants/shops/whatever they really want all while still keeping the building's famous memorable facades.
• R.E.M.'s debut album, Murmur, gave an unexpected amount of publicity to the abandoned railway trestle in Athens, Georgia depicted on the back cover, to the point where it became a popular tourist destination despite its dilapidation. So popular was "the Murmur trestle" that the local community continuously pushed hard to preserve it as a landmark until it was ultimately dismantled in 2022.

Theme Parks

• The opening of the Norway pavilion at EPCOT Center in 1989 led to a 400% increase in American tourism to the actual country Norway the following year.

Video Games

• Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which is set in an accurately recreated medieval Central Bohemia, caused a tourist boom for the castle of Talmberk, the former mining town Stříbrná Skalice, the castle city of Rataje-nad-Sazávou, Sázava Monastery and the ruins of Přibyslavice, which were all featured as major locations in the game.
• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has been used to promote tourism in Ireland due to featuring a recreation of it in the 9th century in the Wrath of the Druids DLC add-on.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout: New Vegas helped put the town of Goodsprings on the map as it's an important location in the game's story. The locals in return have a copy of the New Vegas box art framed on the walls of the Pioneer Saloon (the real-life counterpart to the in-game Prospector Saloon). There's also several other Fallout memorabilia, brought there by fans, inside the saloon.
  • Fallout 4 resulted in a tourist bump to the town of Bar Harbor due to the game's Far Harbor DLC.
  • Fallout 76 resulted in a minor tourism boon for the state of West Virginia as several of its prominent landmarks are featured in the game.
• Far Cry 5 has been used to promote tourism in Montana due to being set in the fictional Hope County.
• Ghost of Tsushima: Due to the popularity of the game, the Nagasaki Prefecture used it to promote tourism for the Tsushima island. In March 2021, creative leads Nate Fox and Jason Connell were named as tourism ambassadors for making the island's history known.
• World of Tanks caused a surge in interest in historical tanks and therefore in tank museums, notably big ones such as Kubinka in Russia, Saumur in France and Bovington in the United Kingdom.
• The Yakuza series has brought attention to an array of locations across Japan, particularly since the series' resurgence in the West after Yakuza 0; most notably this has led to increased interest in Kabuki-cho, Tokyo (which the series' "Kamurocho" is based upon) and Dotonbori in Osaka ("Sotenbori"). Onomichi in Hiroshima actively sought to co-operate with Sega on Yakuza 6 in expectation of this.

Visual Novels

• Higurashi: When They Cry: Shirakawa-go, the real-life village Hinamizawa was based on, had to build a new shrine wall to accommodate all of the fans visiting the village.

Web Original

• Discussed in TheRealJims's review of The Simpsons episode "Bart on the Road". In the episode, Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin travel to Knoxville, Tennessee to see the Sunsphere from the 1982 World's Fair, unaware that they were using a travel guide from 1982 (the episode originally aired in 1996). Jim expressed interested in traveling to Knoxville himself just to say it was something he'd done as a Simpsons fan.

Western Animation

• The South Park episode "Casa Bonita" prominently features the titular restaurant located in Lakewood, Colorado. It is said the employees there keep track of whenever the episode airs to prepare themselves for the spike in business that usually occurs afterwards. And then in 2021, the restaurant was bought up by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Real Life

• Regionally, the areas of Pittsburgh PBS "scrapbook documentary" producer Rick Sebak produces popular specials about, such as Kennywood Park, the North Side, the Strip District, the Primanti Brothers sandwich shop and Oakland, PA have turned into tourist traps (or more popular tourist traps), for locals and out-of-towners. (Oakland is itself the home of WQED, the TV station where Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was taped.)
• For railway operators that openly publish their station or line use statistics, the least used station within a given year inevitably attracts a horde of Rail Enthusiasts who visit the station for the novelty and experience. In the UK, which publishes national station usage statistics on an annual basis, the title of "Least Used Station" is virtually never held by the same station twice in a row for this reason.

In-Universe Examples

• In The Big Bang Theory, this happens to Stuart's comic book shop when Neil Gaiman praised it on Twitter. Before, it was barely scraping by with just the main cast seemingly as the only regular customers. Afterwards, the guys stop by and find the place incredibly busy. Sheldon actually has to take a step outside to see if it's the same place.
• At the end of Cars, Lightning McQueen moves his training headquarters to Radiator Springs so he can be close with his new friends. The sequels show that the once dying town is now thriving thanks to its association with racing star McQueen.
• Young Sheldon: Discussed in "A Stolen Truck and Going on the Lam". Sheldon deduces that Missy is going to Los Angeles, as she is a big fan of Beverly Hills, 90210. To be fair, Missy and Paige considered going there, but since they had already driven five hours east, they kept going that way.

---