Supermarket Safari and Story-driven Trips:
cultural immersion goes pop, personal and unexpected

1. The tourism of the extraordinarily ordinary: a new definition of cultural immersion

There was a moment in the history of modern tourism when cultural immersion was synonymous with the museum, UNESCO site, Michelin-starred restaurant, and guided tour. A curated, hierarchical package of "important things" to see. 2026 has definitively filed that idea away — not to devalue it, but to expand it in directions no tourism bureau had anticipated. The aisle of a supermarket. The location of a Netflix series. A bookshop made famous by a novel. The neighbourhood of a fictional character.

The Skyscanner Travel Trends 2026 report captures it precisely: travellers in 2026 are building itineraries around their own passions, priorities, and a personal sense of "worth it". No longer the checklist of obligatory sights, but an emotional map of things that resonate. This shift in perspective has two main and complementary expressions: the Supermarket Safari — the exploration of local supermarkets as an act of authentic cultural immersion — and Story-driven Destinations, chosen because they are the setting of stories — books, films, TV series — that have created an emotional resonance in the traveller.

Both respond to the same underlying need: the search for unconstructed authenticity, for connection with the daily life of places visited, for experiences that carry personal meaning rather than status value. Tourism is becoming autobiographical.

"The most honest museum of a culture is not the one with ancient marble. It is the supermarket beneath the homes of its inhabitants."

2. Supermarket Safari: when the aisle becomes a cultural access point

The most surprising figure in the Hilton 2026 Travel Trends Report: 77% of travellers say they already visit local supermarkets during their trips to discover authentic food and drink offerings. 35% explicitly plan a stop at a local supermarket on their next holiday. This is not a niche phenomenon — it is already the norm. What 2026 has done is simply give a name to a behaviour that was already widespread, and in naming it has amplified its awareness and intentionality.

The Skyscanner 2026 report places it among the year's seven major trends under the name "Shelf Discovery", describing how culinary tourism is swapping restaurant reservations for supermarket safaris. Two thirds of German travellers regularly visit local supermarkets when travelling: 44% to find new foods unavailable at home, 32% to discover regional variations of familiar products, 35% to experience everyday culinary life. In Japan, the phenomenon has gone viral on TikTok with a 5,000% increase in searches related to konbini tourism.

The drivers are two and mutually reinforcing: authenticity and economy. In an era when restaurants in tourist destinations cost ever more and increasingly offer domesticated versions of local cuisine, the supermarket provides the authentic version — what the inhabitants actually eat — at prices that allow the savings to be reinvested in experiences rather than expensive meals.

3. Aisles as anthropology: what you really discover in a foreign supermarket

What makes a foreign supermarket so revealing? The answer lies in the very nature of the space: the supermarket is the only place where a country's culture shows itself to the tourist without filters. No translated menus, no staging for the foreign guest, no compromise with international tastes. It is the private, everyday version of a society — the shopping list of an entire nation.

The most revealing observations in foreign aisles concern not only the products but the proportions: what occupies most space, what is expensive and what is affordable, what is individually packaged and what is sold loose. In Japan, konbini show an obsessive attention to detail and aesthetics even in everyday consumer products — every onigiri is wrapped like a gift. In Spain, the oils section occupies more space than the mineral water. In France, the supermarket cheese counter is often more carefully curated than that of many Italian restaurants. In Finland, the dairy aisle is vast, with dozens of varieties of fermented milk that exist nowhere else.

"Shelfie souvenirs" — items bought from foreign shelves as culinary keepsakes — have become the most authentic and widely shared form of travel memory on social media: 89% of travellers consider the purchase of artisan spices, preserves, or local products a more meaningful souvenir than anything found in a tourist shop. The supermarket is not a fallback — it is the portal.

4. The most iconic Supermarket Safari destinations of 2026

Not all supermarkets are equal — and not all cities offer the same quality of experience. The destinations attracting the most intentional "grocery tourists" in 2026 combine supermarkets with a strongly distinctive cultural profile, covered local markets, and the possibility of buying directly from producers in surrounding areas.

5. Story-driven Destinations: travel as the continuation of an emotional narrative

Alongside the Supermarket Safari — rooted in the ordinary — 2026 sees the explosion of a tourism founded on the emotionally exceptional: Story-driven Destinations. Places chosen not for their objective value in a tourist hierarchy, but for the subjective resonance created by a story — a book, a film, a TV series — that has left an emotional imprint on the traveller.

The phenomenon is not new — Harry Potter fans have been visiting Oxford and Edinburgh for twenty years, Game of Thrones fans invaded Dubrovnik — but in 2026 it has reached an unprecedented scale thanks to the combination of global streaming, social media, and a new awareness that travel can be an act of continuation of one's own narrative life. Expedia estimates that set-jetting will become an $8 billion industry in the United States alone. 81% of Gen Z and Millennials plan holidays inspired by series or films they have watched. Ireland launched a "Starring Great Britain" campaign dedicated to the locations of major British productions; New Zealand still lives on the Hobbiton wave two decades on.

Even more interesting — and with greater longevity according to researchers — is literary tourism. 43% of travellers have already undertaken a book-inspired trip or would like to. 91% say they are attracted to trips centred on reading, rest, and reconnection. Pinterest searches for "book retreats" have doubled. Mentions of reading in Vrbo reviews are up 285%.

"Standing in the neighbourhood where your favourite character lived is not nostalgia. It is a way of inhabiting for a moment a story that changed something in you."

6. Set-jetting and literary travel: when a series or a book changes the map

Set-jetting — a blend of "set" (film set) and "jetting" (travelling) — has a characteristic that distinguishes it from other forms of cultural tourism: it is based on the emotional intelligence of a place, not on its conventional historical or artistic importance. A Sicilian view becomes magnetic because it is where The White Lotus is set; a Yorkshire village irrelevant to tourist guides becomes a destination for pilgrimage because James Herriot drinks tea there. The story — in its narrative sense — reassesses geographies that the conventional tourist hierarchy had ignored.

Literary tourism has, as Professor Gregory Ramshaw of Clemson University observes, a greater degree of longevity than pure set-jetting: books are read by different generations, can "return" through cinematic adaptations, and create a type of connection with a place that is more meditative and less dependent on scenic fidelity. Visiting Peter Mayle's Provence, Colm Tóibín's Ireland, Elena Ferrante's Naples, or Thomas Hardy's Dorset meadows is an act that requires a different quality of attention from the hunt for Instagram locations.

The most active story-driven destinations of 2026

• 01
  New Zealand · The Middle-earth that still lives
  Hobbiton at Matamata is the most sophisticated example of institutionalised set-jetting: a production location transformed into a permanent tourist destination, with guided routes, pints at the Green Dragon Inn, and a level of detail that transforms the visit from nostalgia into immersion. All around, the New Zealand landscape remains extraordinary enough to justify the journey even without Tolkien.
• 02
  Naples · The geography of My Brilliant Friend
  Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend has transformed the perception of Naples for a generation of readers. The Rione Luzzatti — the working-class neighbourhood of the novel, identifiable but never made explicit by Ferrante herself — has become the subject of unofficial literary tours. The Naples of narrow streets, alleyways, and neighbourhood markets is exactly where supermarket safari and literary tourism meet.
• 03
  South Korea · The Seoul of Squid Game and Parasite
  The "Korean Wave" (Hallyu) has produced extraordinary travel demand: series locations, film neighbourhoods, markets and street food seen in productions. Seoul has exploded as a tourist destination partly thanks to Squid Game and Parasite, but visitors discover that the real city — its markets, its neighbourhoods, its Noryangjin — is even more interesting than any fiction.
• 04
  Ireland · The landscape of novels and series
  Dubrovnik for Game of Thrones, County Kerry for Normal People, the Scottish Highlands for Outlander: the British Isles are the stage for European set-jetting. Ireland has actively invested in literary tourism infrastructure — Joycean routes in Dublin, Beckett itineraries, paths through fictionalised landscapes — creating tourist products that outlast the lifecycle of the series that triggered them.

7. Self-expression Travel: the destination is secondary to the story you seek

Beyond the Supermarket Safari and set-jetting, there is a deeper principle that unifies them both: what Booking.com calls the "Era of ME" in its 2026 report, and which we might define as Self-expression Travel. Travel as an act of self-expression and self-construction. Not "what is there to see in this place?" but "what do I want to become through this journey?"

This shift is measurable: according to Santosh Kumar, Booking.com's regional manager for South-East Asia, travel in 2026 is increasingly used by travellers to "test relationships, connect with loved ones, and step into fantasy worlds". Karan Agarwal of Cox & Kings describes travellers who "unplug and seek more meaningful experiences" — curated to reflect tastes, passions, and desires for personal improvement. 25% of young travellers choose their destination for value for money; 18% for escape from the everyday. The mere fact that "escape" and not "attractiveness of the destination" is the second driver of choice is telling.

Self-expression Travel takes the principle of personalisation to its logical conclusion: if travel is a narrative and identity act, then the choice of which supermarket to visit, which book to read on the train, which neighbourhood to explore without a map, which literary retreat to disappear to for a week — these are all acts of the same story. The traveller's story.

8. Food as a universal language: eating well while travelling without compromise

The Supermarket Safari has a very concrete practical dimension: it allows one to eat better, more authentically, and more affordably than tourist restaurants permit. A breakfast prepared with local supermarket products — seasonal fresh fruit, artisan bread, regional cheeses — is often superior in quality and cultural meaning to a hotel buffet breakfast at thirty euros. And meals cooked in an apartment or eaten in a park with market produce are the most direct form of food immersion available to the traveller.

But the challenge of eating while travelling is not only economic — it is biological. Abrupt dietary changes, exposure to new microbial flora, altered mealtimes, sleep quality compromised by the different composition of foods consumed: the digestive system and the microbiome face a significant transition during every journey, particularly when culinary exploration is as intentional and diverse as in the Supermarket Safari.

9. Bringing culinary culture home: the edible souvenir

One of the most interesting and practical aspects of the Supermarket Safari is its natural extendability over time: products bought from foreign shelves become cultural access points for weeks after returning home. Greek olive oil, Japanese miso paste, Israeli tahini, Mexican mole, Thai green curry paste — each is a narrative device that, placed on the kitchen shelf at home, reopens the sensory memory of the journey every time one cooks.

89% of travellers consider the purchase of artisan spices, preserves, or oils a more meaningful souvenir than anything found in a tourist shop. The "shelfie souvenir" — the photograph of a foreign shelf shared on social media — has become the new postcard. But its deeper version is the silent one: the habit of cooking with a foreign ingredient, of remembering where it was bought, of trying to replicate a flavour and discovering it can never be fully replicated — because part of that flavour was the air, the light, the moment.