Lights, Camera, Book It!

TOKYO The barstool where Bill Murray sat in a scene from the award-winning film “Lost in Translation” is now a tourist attraction. “You can imagine, if you’re here late at night, the mood from the movie,” said Mike Martin, a 37-year-old Londoner who had parked his derrière in the same place as Murray’s is in the film about a fast-formed relationship between an aging movie star and a frustrated new bride. “You can feel that kind of intimacy here.”

Executives at the Park Hyatt Tokyo are surprised by the success of the film but not so stunned that they aren’t mining the popularity for all it’s worth. The hotel now offers a five-day, $3,600 “Lost in Translation” package, including breakfast, massage, drinks and a map of the sites featured in the film.

“We get a lot of people now, especially from the States, who walk through with video cameras, saying ‘this is where Bill Murray did this, and this is where this happened,’ ” said Michael Golden, director of rooms at the Park Hyatt Tokyo.

A new trend has clearly emerged. Destinations that are featured in movies and television shows are aggressively capitalizing on the exposure. And the best news for travel agents is that this strategy is working.

Tokyo is not the only destination milking Hollywood fame. New Zealand has used its role as the setting for Middle Earth in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to attract planeloads of new visitors. The Japanese city of Kyoto is using its star turn in “The Last Samurai” to spearhead new marketing campaigns. Towns around North Carolina’s Cold Mountain are rolling out the red carpet. England has Harry Potter and even the minor hit “Under the Tuscan Sun,” which presented the Italian countryside in all its splendor, has spurred lots of interest from travelers and competition from the area’s tour operators to best capitalize on the craze. Metropolitan Touring’s vessel in Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, the 90-passenger Santa Cruz, was used by director Peter Weir and the crew filming “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.”

Of course, some destinations will forever be associated with classic films. Salzburg still offers “The Sound of Music” tour, and I ate at a restaurant a few years ago in Goa, India, that still promotes itself by mentioning that Roger Moore ate there in the 1980s while filming the James Bond movie “Octopussy” nearby.

What is new is the sophistication and the immediate effectiveness of the current wave of using Hollywood as a way to sell travel destinations.

New Zealand’s official tourism agency conducted a survey in 2003 among international visitors that showed that almost one in 10 cited “The Lord of the Rings” as one of the reasons they chose to visit New Zealand. The boom promises to last even longer since the final film of the trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” won the Golden Globe for best dramatic movie of the year and is nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

In November, to promote the December release of the final film, Air New Zealand unveiled its third aircraft painted in a “Lord of the Rings” theme. The 747-400 has a 157-foot-long design along the fuselage depicting the faces of two of the films stars.

Those who arrive at Wellington International Airport on any airline, meanwhile, are greeted by an enormous steel and aluminum rendering of the movies’ computer-generated character Gollum, who seems to be climbing over the airport’s North Pier Terminal.

“The final installment of this motion picture trilogy offers unparalleled opportunities for us through massive media and consumer interest in the film to lift the profile of New Zealand both as Middle Earth and also as a remarkable destination for today’s travelers,” said Gus Gilmore, Air New Zealand’s vice president-Western region.

At least three New Zealand-based tour companies sell escorted trips to see locations featured in the trilogy.

On the other side of the real earth, the strategy is working, too.

Colorado-based Beyond Boundaries Travel offers a commissionable six-day Live the Legend trip to locations used in the Harry Potter movies. An actor from the films, Chris Rankin, who plays Percy Weasley, even joins the tour for an entire day.

Stateside, the Richmond Hill Inn in Asheville, N.C., has seen an explosion of interest because of the Oscar-nominated Civil War love story “Cold Mountain.” Said inn marketing director Mark File: “The book promoted it some, but now with the movie, folks are really interested in the area. People want to know if the town from the movie is there which it’s not. The mountain is. It’s very beautiful.”

Back across the Atlantic to Italy, “unsolicited e-mail queries are double what they normally are this time of year,” said Mitch Baranowksi, the U.S.-based spokesman for Toscana Ville Castelli, which offers commissionable packages at Il Borgo di Villa Bossi-Pucci, a 25-suite property housed in six restored farm buildings on a 17th century Tuscan estate.

Contorting to capitalize on the film “Under the Tuscan Sun,” the property is pushing what it calls “rural residential tourism” in this case, a seven-night Lessons of Tuscany package which includes cooking classes, language lessons and authentic local meals.

A competitor, Tuscan Way, is touting its commissionable packages at four private villas it runs in Tuscany. The villas come stocked with food and wine and aim to “immerse guests” in the local lifestyle.

What this shows is that a destination need not work directly through a Hollywood studio to benefit from the exposure a big-time movie can bring.

The Japan National Tourist Organization did not work with the producers of “Lost in Translation” or “The Last Samurai,” but since the movies’ releases, the country has noticed the benefits, said JNTO spokeswoman Marian Goldberg. “We have seen that people have become interested in Japan after seeing the movies,” she said. “Americans who have already been to Japan who have seen ‘Lost in Translation’ related tremendously to it. ‘The Last Samurai’ depicts aspects of Japan that are intriguing to Americans. With both movies, they can understand how to have a personal experience in the country.”

Officials from the city of Kyoto did work with one of Japan’s largest tour operators, Kintetsu, to figure out how to join the bandwagon, hosting “The Samurai Mission” events on the streets of Hollywood and L.A.’s Little Tokyo in December with performers dressed in traditional costumes strolling the sidewalks.

“The Last Samurai,” while doing well at the box office in Japan, has not been the runaway hit Stateside that producers had hoped, demonstrating one of the risks any destination runs by putting too many hopes into a film’s muscle early. More dependable are plain old advertising dollars.

“The government of Japan has doubled and tripled its tourism budgets over the past few years,” said Bill Sarcona, administrator of Kintetsu USA. “That is having more of an effect than anything, advertising in the U.S. to attract tourists.”

Still, as the science of capitalizing on movie locations evolves, there are high hopes among travel professionals that the current wave of successful campaigns will spur the movie and travel industries to learn how to better work with each other.

“It’s a valuable way of marketing,” said Nina Lora, a spokesperson for the Park Hyatt Tokyo. “There isn’t a science to it yet because it’s so new. We have to look at it on a case by case basis.”

There are also concerns about upsetting high-profile and high-spending clients by revealing too much about what they did in the confines of a hotel. For instance, a suite at the Plaza Athénée in Paris is a setting for the final episode of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” but hotel executives don’t want to be specific about which suite was used nor what the stars, such as Chris Noth, who plays Mr. Big, did in their off-hours.

“If you were Mr. Big, you wouldn’t like it if you read in the newspaper that you had a king-size bed and you had such and such a service,” said spokeswoman Isabelle Maurin. “It would make such people uncomfortable.”

Such concerns dampen with time. Some movies that are decades old are still acting as perpetual advertisements for destinations. The mere mention that a beach near a hotel in Kauai was used in “South Pacific,” the 1958 musical, can be enough to make a sale.

In fact, Hawaii Movie Tours offers commissionable trips on Kauai to locations used in “South Pacific,” “Jurassic Park,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Fantasy Island.”

This sort of marketing works. Savannah, Ga., saw overnight stays by visitors climb after the release of the book and film “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” from 3.5 million in 1994 to 10.5 million in 2002. The amount spent by Savannah visitors increased from $587 million in 1994 to just over $1 billion in 2002.

Hima Singh, president of Asian Pacific Adventures in Tarzana, Calif., says her company has received “a sudden flurry of inquiries” from people who want to go to Japan in March and April. “Usually they plan such a trip six or eight months out, but now they are calling to go in April, which makes me think it’s got to be the movies.”

Back at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, Golden, the rooms director, is amazed by how many people want to sit in Bill Murray’s barstool, even though the movie isn’t set for release in Japan until April.

“There’s a queue of people who want to sit in that seat,” he said. “And I imagine when it’s released locally, it’ll be worse.”

Worse, if you are one of those waiting for a chair in the popular bar. Better if you’re a travel agent with new clients who walked into your office because they loved “Lost in Translation” and want to know if you can book them into the hotel where it was shot.