High season is coming: travel motivations of Game of Thrones fans
Beatriz Gómez-Morales,
Deborah Castro and
Jorge Nieto-Ferrando
Current Issues in Tourism, 2024, vol. 27, issue 23, 3999-4012
Abstract:
Despite substantial evidence that media fans are increasingly travelling to the filming locations for movies and TV series, research on core tribal fan film tourists’ travel motivations remains limited. This paper contributes to the scarce literature on this question with a study of the fan tourism phenomenon inspired by the fiction TV series Game of Thrones. The study is based on 68 semi-structured in-depth interviews with fans of the series; specifically, core fan community members who have travelled to one or more of the series’ filming locations. A thematic analysis of the interview responses reveals three main travel motivations: affective identification with characters; the existence of parallels between fiction and history; and the desire to feel part of a collective identity. The findings suggest that tourism motivated by Game of Thrones is the result of a profound emotional and narrative attachment to the series on the part of fans, with a combination of playful and serious elements. On the theoretical level, this paper contributes to the scholarly literature on fan film tourism. It also reveals that a better understanding of fans’ needs could support tourist destination managers in the creation of added value for fan film tourists.
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2023.2272731 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:27:y:2024:i:23:p:3999-4012
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rcit20
DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2023.2272731
Access Statistics for this article
Current Issues in Tourism is currently edited by Jennifer Tunstall
More articles in Current Issues in Tourism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().