A new chapter in literary tourism

A new generation of celebrity book clubs, library-themed wine bars, public readings and the rise of BookTok and Bookstagram — reading is in, and the travel industry is taking note.

Literary tourism — travel inspired by books — is becoming more popular, galvanized by the resurgence of book clubs, literary festivals and bookish celebrations coupled with the continued desire for post-pandemic connection. And tour operators, both new and established, are curating itineraries for bibliophiles to bring their love of the written word to life.

Anna Abelson, an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality who focuses on tourism and niche travel, said there has been an increase in travel inspired by literature.

“I am sure many more of these tours will be offered,” she said.

Live events marketplace Eventbrite reported a 26% year-over-year increase in book events in 2023 and a 35% jump in U.S. attendance. That surge has turned some book club leaders into tour guides. 

Los Angeles-based Hayley Solano launched The Enchanted Book Club in 2021 as an online book club for lovers of classic literature, including the works of Jane Austen and L. M. Montgomery. As the community grew — Solano’s Instagram, where she posts recommendations and cultivates the club, has 109,000 followers — she started offering trips, using a travel advisor to help create itineraries. 

The first tour, in 2023, brought book club members to England to experience the country through a literary lens and proved so popular that Solano is bringing it back this year.

She will also lead two other itineraries in the coming months: Prince Edward Island for an “Anne of Green Gables” tour and a Classic Authors trip to England that will feature the likes of Austen, Beatrix Potter and Elizabeth Gaskell. There will be two departure dates for each itinerary, and the England trip currently has a 200-person waitlist, Solano said. 

Another book-inspired operator is Vanessa Hunt, who launched The Book Club Tour in 2019. Her love of reading was fostered while she was living in Scotland with her grandmother, who was working toward a doctorate in British literature.

Hunt will operate two itineraries this year: one featuring Austen and Agatha Christie and another focused on other British authors, including the Bronte sisters. She is developing itineraries for next year, including one inspired by “Outlander” that will expand her company’s reach to Scotland. The tours sell out in just one or two days and quickly amass a waitlist, Hunt said. 

Solano said she has spent years cultivating literary relationships, which now translate to the ability to offer special access to tour guests that solo visitors wouldn’t have. For instance, her book club members were granted permission to see the original “Anne of Green Gables” manuscript last year, a treat given its fragility. This year, while visiting Austen’s house, the book club will get a private tour and see Austen artifacts not normally available for public viewing.

Peeling back the curtain on the lives of famed authors enriches the experience and brings the books — and authors’ worlds — to life and provides them with ways to connect with fellow travelers, Solano said.

“A lot of these women have dreamed of going to these places their whole lives,” she said of members. “It’s a part of our hearts that we usually keep to ourselves, and suddenly you find yourself in a community of people who understand a part of you that you don’t typically share. So it’s a really beautiful experience for people.” 

Those meaningful connections are fueling the niche’s growth spurt, said NYU’s Abelson, who does an annual survey on the trends that drive family travel. Literary tourism will be on this year’s questionnaire, she said, adding that book-themed travel provides opportunities for families and travelers to more deeply connect with one another through a shared interest. 

“Being a part of the group, the sense of belonging: I think it’s also an impact of a pandemic, when we were really separated, but now we are really trying to create some meaningful communities around interests that really connect us,” Abelson said. 

Solano has found that storytelling spurs connection and leads to friendships formed among the group. Hunt said that the shared love of literature promotes purposeful engagement among her clients.

“My goal beyond the literature is to bring women together, especially women that have an appreciation for literature and for stories and how we can tie our own stories to these stories that we’ve grown up loving, to create friendships through them,” Hunt said.

The book on literary travel

Some tour operators have long offered literary trips, such as Smithsonian Journeys, which launched its Mystery Lover’s England itinerary in 2006 and said it has since maintained steady interest. The tour features authors from Devon, Oxford and London and the worlds of Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Each trip features expert guests; this year’s departures will bring along Michael Jecks, a crime writer who has penned some 50 books inspired by the history and legends of the moorlands where he lives in England. 

The Mystery Lover’s tour captures the attention of armchair sleuths wanting to tap into the minds of great detective writers and see the cities that inspired their favorite mysteries, said Smithsonian Journeys spokeswoman Angela Ferragamo, who said it gets booked almost as soon as it is offered. “They want it, they know it, they come back to it,” she said of guests. 

Smithsonian at Oxford trip participants transform themselves into Oxford University students for a week and do deep dives on singular topics. This year there are two book-themed weeks, one focusing on Charles Dickens and the other on Austen. Smithsonian also partnered with Scotland’s St. Andrew’s University for the Great Scottish Writers: From Sherlock Holmes and Treasure Island to Peter Pan itinerary.

Austen tours are hot this year, as fans of the author celebrate her 250th birthday. Austen’s England made the New York Times’ 52 Places to Go in 2025 list.

Smithsonian’s Jane Austen in Context tour visits Jane Austen’s House museum in Chawton, the village in South Downs National Park where she spent the final years of her life. Her home is celebrating the milestone with festivals and a birthday party in December, and while a spokesperson for the museum said it was too soon to share visitor numbers for this year, it expects to surpass the 40,000 annual visitors it averages. 

A unique way to celebrate Austen’s 250th is with Active England, a walking and cycling tour operator leading a six-day guided walking tour from London to Bath for the Jane Austen Festival at the Jane Austen Centre. Guests will walk four to eight miles a day. The English tour operator offers other literary walking tours for clients inspired by Beatrix Potter, Daphne du Maurier and William Wordsworth, and it plans to offer a group walking tour next year for Christie fans. 

“We have a lot of experience in this type of tourism [by] really taking the author’s favorite places, quotes from their novels and turning it into a journey,” said Gaby Cecil, Active England’s head of commercial. “The depths are endless. You really can keep going and keep unpacking some of the literary notions that kind of feed through into these different places.” 

Tracing the paths that famed authors walked provides an immersive experience for travelers, Cecil said, and “brings the trip alive.” For the Austen-themed tour, the Active guides will be Austen aficionados: one who loves diving into the “societal lens” of Austen’s work and the other focused on her connections with nature. 

Witnessing the places featured in novels or the former stomping grounds of an author “really blurs the lines between fiction and reality,” Solano said. “It’s coming to life before your eyes. And that is such an enchanting experience.”

Who books literary tours?

Smithsonian’s Ferragamo called those who book its literary itineraries “intellectually curious, in the sense of really wanting to go deeper.”

That is an attractive type of traveler for many destinations, Abelson said, and why destinations might want to actively market their literary connections. 

“That would be the kind of respectful and sustainable traveler that each individual destination would love to have,” she said, adding that type of tourism also inspires groups, whether book clubs or online fan pages. 

Destinations are well versed on the success “set-jetters” bring to destinations where popular movies and television shows are filmed, with “The White Lotus” effect on travel being well documented in the few years since the series premiered on HBO. 

And while books-turned-movies, like “Harry Potter” or “Twilight” — which put the tiny city of Forks, Wash., on the map — already fuel travel, literary tourism might be less fleeting than set-jetting, said Gregory Ramshaw, a tourism professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. 

“The literary stuff is really interesting insofar as it seems to have a few more legs, have a bit more staying power, probably, than some of these more ephemeral forms, particularly film and television,” he said, adding that while some literature can also be short-lived, many books are embraced by multiple generations “in a way that can be fresh for them … it can be something that can be discovered.”

Other settings

While the U.K. is the current epicenter of literary tourism, literature lovers can celebrate their favorite authors worldwide. 

In the U.S., famous authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Harper Lee and Ernest Hemingway also inspire literary pilgrimages. 

The Florida Keys, for example, draws fans to the Hemingway House & Museum; on tours of where he lived, wrote and imbibed; and to a multiday festival honoring the writer’s legacy. In Baltimore, fans can visit the Poe House & Museum and take bus tours tracing his life. 

New York has a variety of ways to celebrate authors, including literary pub crawls paying homage to e.e. Cummings and F. Scott Fitzgerald and many tours celebrating James Baldwin, including ones that trace his walk from Harlem downtown through Central Park in his seminal 1953 novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

Viator showcases the Savannah, Ga., tour, A Walk Through the Book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” and a Margaret Mitchell tour in Atlanta. Lorain, Ohio, celebrates its native Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. 

Books are also celebrated in places that aren’t connected to a specific story or author. 

Avalon Waterways offers storyteller cruises that have brought popular contemporary authors to the Danube in Europe. Past authors have included Diana Gabaldon, who wrote “Outlander”; Cheryl Strayed, who penned the memoir “Wild”; and Gillian Flynn, who authored “Gone Girl.” The 2022 Flynn cruise went viral, and the Gabaldon cruise sold out in two days. 

Ladies Who Lit offers several international vacations with its “single priority to give you space and time to read.” Its sold-out trips include Italy, Spain and Morocco.

The Bookhouse Hotel in Kennett Square, Pa., opened in 2023, with its 5,000 books far surpassing its number of rooms (four). The Library Hotel in New York has its 6,000 tomes organized by the Dewey decimal system. In Portugal, the tourism authority for Alentejo and Ribatejo is planning to develop a network of literary hotels and market 16 literary tourism routes in the region, Portugal News reported.