Missing Identity: Relocation of Budapest in Film-induced Tourism

Abstract

The Hungarian capital city has been the protagonist or at least the supporting actress of numerous feature films; however, Budapest cannot be identified with a unique image to promote herself in film-induced tourism. The visual representations of the city's symbolic economy play an important role in the creation of place identity. The purpose of this study is to analyze the identity of Budapest and its cultural landscape depicted in international and Hungarian movie productions. The article highlights the consequences of this specific use of the urban place and how these images can influence Budapest's role in film tourism. In order to explore the potential of Budapest in the film tourism niche market, an analysis of tourists' perception of the capital city and tourists' attitude towards film-induced tourism was undertaken. The results of the visitor survey show that international tourists staying in Budapest would be interested to discover the film locations in the city; however, they were not able to link the titles of films set in Budapest to the real film location. Hosting international film productions clearly has a positive impact on the economy as a whole, but tourism destination marketing cannot benefit from the motion pictures' success when Budapest interprets somewhere else.