Winding rivers, floating clouds and scattered Mongolian yurts combine to create a stunningly poetic landscape on the prairie in East Ujimqin Banner, North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, July 25, 2015.(Photo/Xinhua)
Chinese are choosing travel destinations based on TV-and film-shooting locations during tourism's peak season.
Chinese TV and cinema are producing celebrities who aren't people.
They're places.
Constellations of star sites seen on screens have become some of the most popular summer-travel packages, tourism-industry insiders say.
The country's largest online travel agency, Ctrip, in July released its Top 10 packages designed to take tourists to sites featured on TV and film. Rankings are based on purchase volumes.
Overseas destinations are Saipan, Dubai, Turkey, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Domestic locations are Jilin, Yunnan and Jiangsu provinces, and the Guangxi Zhuang and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions.
Ctrip currently runs nearly 100 travel routes to follow hit film-and TV-shooting destinations.
"They're popular with people born in the 1980s and '90s," Ctrip's marketing director Dai Yu says.
About 60 percent of travelers who take the routes opt for group tours, she says.
Ctrip expects travelers who buy packages based on TV-and film-shooting destinations to total tens of thousands from May to August.
No 1 is Saipan's Last Command Post, made famous among Chinese by the hit Hurry Up, Brother game-variety TV show.
Thing is, many Americans have never heard of Saipan or even the Northern Mariana Islands, even though the archipelago is a US commonwealth.
"We've seen a vast increase in searches for Saipan since the late June episode of Hurry Up, Brother," Dai says.
Chinese online travel agency Tuniu.com's Saipan-product manager Liu Wei says one in five of the site's island-destination bookings are to Saipan.
TV and film aren't only determining where people go but also what they do there.
Take the flood of tourists to Gubei Water Town in Beijing's Miyun county after it was featured in Hurry Up, Brother.
"We receive tourists who specifically ask to play the rip-the-nameplate game featured on the show," says Liu Siqi, brand manager of the Beijing Wtown Tourism Co, which runs the attraction.
