How One TV Show Sent Muskoka Searches Up 110%: The 2026 'Set-Jetting' Effect

Set-jetting — the habit of booking a trip to somewhere you first saw on a screen — is no longer a fun footnote in travel data. It is now a projected US$8 billion business in the United States alone, according to Expedia Group's 2026 forecast, and the single loudest example this year is a place most people could not have found on a map twelve months ago: Muskoka, the lake country north of Toronto.

After the streaming hit Heated Rivalry set its finale at a cottage on Lake Muskoka, Expedia recorded a 110% surge in searches for the region. The actual filming location — the Barlochan cottage on the west shore of Lake Muskoka — went up for short-stay bookings on Airbnb at a deliberately symbolic CAD $248.10 a night. That is the set-jetting effect in miniature: one show, one shooting location, a doubling of demand.

Why one show can move a whole region

The mechanics are simple and a little unnerving for anyone who works in tourism. A show lands, viewers fall for a landscape as much as the characters, and within weeks the search graphs for that landscape bend upward. Expedia's data — drawn with market-research partner OnePoll from 24,000 adults across 18 countries — puts the trend squarely with younger travellers, and Expedia's own economists arrive at the US$8 billion figure by applying the share of American adults who have already booked a screen-inspired trip to the wider population.

Muskoka is the headline, but it is not alone. In the United Kingdom, Yorkshire is riding a double bill — Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and the final Downton Abbey film — and Expedia logged a 60% jump in searches for the county in the first six weeks, with summer searches up 35% year on year. In Italy, Emily in Paris sent its story to Rome for season five and searches for the city climbed 35% in the two months after the episodes dropped.

Where 2026's set-jetters are heading next

Expedia's forecast reads like a location scout's diary. Beyond Muskoka and Yorkshire, it flags Tuscany (Jay Kelly), the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia (People We Meet on Vacation), Samoa (the live-action Moana), Los Angeles (Nobody Wants This), Wellington in New Zealand (Avatar: Fire & Ash) and Palawan in the Philippines (The Last Resort). Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, out on 17 July 2026, is already pulling attention toward the Greek Peloponnese, and Spain's Cáceres and Trujillo keep drawing House of the Dragon pilgrims.

The pattern underneath all of it is worth naming, because it explains why set-jetting keeps growing: people are not chasing a plot. They are chasing a place — a lake, a moor, a coastline — that a camera made them feel something about. The story is the introduction. The landscape is the reason they book.

The most cinematic set on earth needs no CGI

This is where those of us in Nepal allow ourselves a quiet smile. No major 2026 production is set in the Himalaya — and yet the scenery that set decorators and colourists spend fortunes trying to conjure already exists here, unedited. The blue of a glacial lake at Gokyo, the sweep of the Annapurna amphitheatre at dawn, the prayer flags snapping above Namche: none of it is graded in post. If a lake in Ontario can move 110% more travellers on the strength of one finale, imagine what standing beneath Everest does to a person in real life.

You do not need a streaming release to justify the trip. Our Everest Base Camp trek and the quieter Manaslu Circuit deliver the kind of establishing shot no series has ever bettered — and unlike a set-jetting hotspot, the Himalaya were never going to be crowded because of a season finale. Browse the full range of Himalayan treks and pick your own opening scene.

Sources: Expedia Group 2026 Set-Jetting Forecast & Unpack '26 (first-party search data; OnePoll survey of 24,000 adults across 18 countries); Forbes, "Set-Jetting, TV- And Film-Driven Tourism, Now An $8 Billion Business" (15 July 2026); Euronews Travel; Time Out. Figures cited as reported, as of August 2026.

Cover photo: Lake of Bays, Muskoka district, Ontario — P199 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5).