By Joan | Nerds Tour

There's a moment that happens to certain kinds of travelers — and if you're reading this, you've probably had it.

You're standing somewhere. A street, a doorway, a stretch of coastline. And something shifts. Not because the view is beautiful, though it might be. Not because your phone is getting good photos, though it might be. But because you know this place. You've been here before — in a book, in a film, in a story that shaped you. And now you're standing inside it.

That feeling has a name now. It's called set-jetting.

What Is Set-Jetting, Exactly?

Set-jetting is the practice of traveling to places because of their connection to a story — a film location, a novelist's hometown, the real setting of a beloved book. It's one of the fastest-growing travel trends of 2026, with travelers booking trips to Iceland, Scotland, southern Italy, and South Korea in significant numbers, driven directly by what they've watched and read.

Thailand saw a surge of visitors after The White Lotus. The Cotswolds fill up every time a new period drama uses its villages as a backdrop. Japan's Kyoto has become a pilgrimage site partly because of its role in countless films and novels. And small towns that were never on anyone's tourist map find themselves suddenly hosting visitors from around the world after a single scene made them famous.

But here's what I think is actually going on beneath the trend.

It's Not Really About the Screen. It's About the Story.

Curious travelers have always done this. We've just never had a catchy name for it.

We travel toward things that matter to us. Toward stories we want to inhabit, worlds we want to understand from the inside. The impulse to stand in the place where something happened — or was imagined, or was written — is as old as travel itself. Pilgrims have been doing it for centuries. Literary tourists have been doing it since the Romantics made the Lake District fashionable.

Set-jetting simply makes that impulse visible, and gives it a hashtag.

The difference between a set-jetter and an ordinary tourist is that the set-jetter already has an emotional relationship with the place before they arrive. They know what happened there — or what a writer imagined there. That's not a disadvantage. It means you arrive curious, primed to notice things, ready to feel the gap between the story and the reality. And that gap, when you find it, is one of the most interesting things travel can give you.

A Practical Note: Filming Location vs. Fictional Setting

Here's something worth knowing before you plan a set-jetting trip: the place where a story is set and the place where it was filmed are often completely different — and both are worth visiting for different reasons.

The 2005 Pride & Prejudice was filmed at Basildon Park in Berkshire and Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. The story is set in Hertfordshire. Downton Abbey is filmed at Highclere Castle in Hampshire. Outlander uses locations across Scotland for a story set across Scotland — but not those specific locations.

Knowing the difference changes how you travel. The filming location gives you the visual — the exact room, the exact light, the exact view from the window. The fictional setting gives you the world — the atmosphere, the landscape, the sense of inhabiting the story's geography rather than its production design. Both are real. Both are worth seeking out. They just give you different things.

Where Nerds Tour Comes In

This is the heart of what I do. And honestly, it's why I started Nerds Tour in the first place.

I've spent years building travel experiences for people who want more than a beautiful place — who want a place that means something. The 2026 Austen Adventure, our escorted group tour of Bath and Winchester this October, is perhaps the clearest expression of this: seven days walking the streets Austen actually walked, staying in the city she lived in, visiting the cathedral where she's buried. Not just visiting filming locations. Inhabiting the world.

And now I'm building something more.

Coming Soon: Bespoke Literary & Cultural Itineraries

Over the coming weeks and months, I'll be posting a growing collection of bespoke itineraries on the Nerds Tour website — designed for small groups of 2 to 10 people, built around the stories, writers, and places that curious travelers actually care about.

Think:

Dickens's World — the Kent countryside of his childhood and the London of his novels: the courts, the counting houses, the dark corners of a city he mapped more completely than any writer before or since
Shakespeare's England — Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, and London, tracing the life and the plays from the town where he was born to the city where he became immortal
Brontë Country — the Yorkshire moors, Haworth, the parsonage where three sisters wrote some of the most extraordinary novels in the English language
The Lake District — Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Ruskin, and the landscape that made them all
All the Light We Cannot See — Paris and Normandy in the footsteps of Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from the streets of occupied Paris to the walled city of Saint-Malo
Murder Most Scenic — England has an astonishing tradition of literary murder set against some of its most beautiful landscapes. From Agatha Christie's Devon to Inspector Morse's Oxford, Midsomer's Buckinghamshire villages to Vera's Northumberland coast, this is a category of trips for the devoted fan of British murder mysteries, on the page and on screen.
King Alfred the Great’s Wessex -
Immersive Travel — itineraries built around your passion, whatever it is. Painters, sculptors, playwrights, architects — if there's a world you want to step inside, we can build a journey around it.

Each itinerary is deeply researched, fully customizable, and designed to be taken at a pace that lets you actually absorb where you are. These are not bus tours. They are carefully crafted experiences for people who travel to understand.

What Story Do You Want to Travel Into?

I'm still building the collection — and I genuinely want your input.

If there's a literary world, a filming location, an architectural era, or a historical period you've always wanted to explore on the ground, I want to hear about it. The best itineraries start with exactly that kind of conversation.

Email me your idea — or if you're ready to start planning something now, schedule a free consultation and let's talk about where your story takes you.

And if you'd like to be the first to know when the new itineraries go live, sign up for The Curious Traveler — the monthly Nerds Tour newsletter, for people who travel with curiosity and come home with stories.

Joan is the founder and head travel advisor at Nerds Tour, a boutique travel agency for the curious traveler. She specializes in literary, cultural, and experiential travel for individuals and small groups.

nerdstour.com · joan@nerdstour.com · @nerdstour

Set-Jetting: The Curious Traveler's Guide to Traveling Into a Story