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The best movies to watch based on where you want to travel

These 10 set-jetting movies were filmed on location, matching a mood to a destination, from Rome's Spanish Steps to Iceland's volcanic roads

A movie can make a place feel real before a traveler buys a ticket. A well-shot film captures the pace, light, and texture of a destination. A list of top-rated restaurants cannot do that. That is the idea behind choosing a movie by destination rather than by star rating. Instead of picking whatever critics praised most, a traveler picks the film that was actually shot in the place calling to them. That film might also simply capture something true about how the place feels to move through.

The 10 travel movies below share one trait above all else. Each was filmed largely or entirely on location. Watching one means watching the real destination, not a studio's approximation of it. Several of these films have gone on to reshape how people plan actual trips. Iceland's tourism board has pointed to a Ben Stiller comedy as one driver of visitor interest. New Zealand built a permanent tourist attraction around a single film set. A quiet 1980s drama turned a working coffee farm outside Nairobi into a Kenyan suburb that still carries a Danish author's name.

This list runs by destination, not by genre, release year, or box office performance, so the way to use it is simple. Find the place already on a traveler's mind, or already booked on a boarding pass. Then watch the film that was shot there before departure. Each entry below names the specific film and the real place it was filmed. Each one also includes concrete details about what a visitor can expect to see there in person. None of the 10 are ranked against each other, since a quiet afternoon in Kyoto and a coastal drive in Iceland were never really in competition. What connects them is that the destination is not incidental to any of these films. It is the reason each one exists in its current form, and seeing it on screen first changes what a traveler notices once they actually arrive.

Roman Holiday turned Rome's Spanish Steps into a landmark

Roman Holiday (1953) is still the clearest starting point for a first trip to Rome. Nearly every scene was filmed on the city's actual streets, not a studio set. Audrey Hepburn plays a runaway princess, and Gregory Peck plays an American reporter. Their day together, on foot and by Vespa, covers most of historic Rome's best-known sights.

The most recognizable scene takes place on the Spanish Steps, in Piazza di Spagna. Hepburn's character eats gelato there while watching the crowd below. The steps fill with visitors soon after sunrise. Arriving before nine in the morning is the only reliable way to see them without a wall of tourists in the frame, gelato vendors included. A short walk away sits the Bocca della Verità, or Mouth of Truth, a carved marble face set into the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. In the film's best-remembered bit, Peck's character pretends the mouth has bitten off his hand. Hepburn's startled reaction was not acting. She did not know what he planned to do, and the crew kept the take.

The Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the quiet street Via Margutta complete the route the two characters walk. Peck's character keeps a small apartment on Via Margutta. None of these locations require a car, a tour bus, or advance tickets to view from the outside. Rome's historic center is compact enough that a visitor can retrace the film's stops on foot in a single day, following roughly the same path the characters take. That route skips the police chase through Piazza Venezia and up Capitoline Hill.

What the film gets right about Rome has not changed since 1953. The city rewards wandering more than scheduling. Its best moments tend to arrive in a piazza a traveler was not specifically looking for. Roman Holiday will not help with restaurant bookings or transit passes. It sets an expectation for pace and mood, and that expectation still holds up on the ground nearly seven decades later.

Tokyo's Park Hyatt hotel anchors Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation (2003) is set largely inside and around the Park Hyatt Tokyo, in Shinjuku. The hotel still leans into the connection, with a top-floor bar resembling the one where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's characters first talk. Sofia Coppola wrote and directed the film, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it.

Murray plays an aging actor in Tokyo to film a whisky commercial. Johansson plays a young woman left alone for days while her photographer husband works. Their friendship forms mostly at night, in Shinjuku's neon side streets, at a Shibuya karaoke parlor, and in taxis crossing a city neither of them can read. The film uses Tokyo's scale on purpose. Characters get lost in elevators, hallways, and crosswalks, and the city's size becomes a stand-in for how disoriented both of them feel in their own lives.

One scene sends Johansson's character on a day trip to Kyoto by bullet train. The shrine she visits is a real, specific place: Heian Shrine, in eastern Kyoto. The film shows her walking across a line of stepping stones through the shrine's garden. Any visitor can recreate that walk, since the garden and its pond are open to the public for a small entrance fee. A wedding procession passes by in the same scene, filmed near the nearby Nanzen-ji temple, a short walk away.

Tokyo has changed since 2003, and some of the specific bars and restaurants the film uses have since closed. The Shibuya scramble crossing has not. It remains one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in the world, and it still floods with people every time the signal changes. A visitor retracing the film's route gets two very different cities in one trip. One is the dense,........

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