Game Of Thrones Case Study

“Game of Thrones”, in case of Northern Ireland.

Smaielova Aruzhan, C2

The word ‘vacation’ from Latin means “leisure, freedom, exemption and being free from duty”. That mean, to escape from daily live procedures with no restrictions in areas of interest. Ryan (2010) primarily said that the vacation includes a general trip with a purpose of overnight stay outside of home. If formerly tourism was anticipated for leisure and comfort, over the years it was derived into different elements with trademark (Zimmermann and Reeves, 2009). As watching television is nowadays the most general action (Busby and Klug, 2001), the impact we can get is strong enough to determine our next journey.

Hudson and Ritchie suggest that film tourism is a growing phenomenon

Northern Ireland has a big potential in promoting itself in this direction. The promotion via film tourism can bring economic advantages to any country, like in examples of “Lord of the Rings” in New Zealand and “Harry Potter” in England.

Game of Thrones, adapted from George Martin’s book series named “A song of Ice and Fire”, is a drama series by HBO channel. There were considered no less than fourteen potential countries for filming whether Northern Ireland became the main and most important with its mystical landscapes, beaches, collapsing castles and moors (gameofthronestours.com, 2014).

Fans of Game of Thrones (GoT) are so into the drama, they come to visit Northern Ireland (NI) which in order boosts tourism of the country. First four seasons apart brought the benefit of £82 million to the economy of Northern Ireland (guardian.com, 2014). It includes the wages of the film crew, different service types and hotels. Within this amount, there were created 5700 part-time and 9000 full-time jobs which respectively reduced the amount of unemployment. Every £1 invested into the project turned into £4.80 of economy rates (Irishcentral.com, 2015). Niall Gibbons, Chief Executive Officer of Tourism Ireland, said that it is expected a boosting of the countries’ funding by 50% within next years. He also plans to promote NI as a must-see location (thelocationguide.com,

In this case, Government of Northern Ireland, HBO and Northern Ireland Tourism Board must undertake the situation before its overexploitation. As after every mass tourism destination, location has ecology and social problems, Northern Ireland as a country still having its nature kept in silence, should be protected from the flow of ecological issues. Bali could be an example to prevent the same dilemma in NI. As human footprints, everywhere tourists spend their time, mostly with big amounts of people, there were left the mountains of garbage, traffic jams and so on (thejakartapost.com, 2011). There needed a strategy way to keep and continue keeping the nature and other environmental substances. In this process for centuries, tour operators should endeavor to protect the mother nature of Northern Ireland.

In the last decades there have been noticed some cases when the usage of a location for promoting tourism brought more disadvantages than advantages. Mostly, they are connected with the ecology as it is very hard to keep the primitive condition of the nature. This research is dedicated to protect future popular destinations by studying the case of Northern Ireland with its potential to future mass tourism coming