Aiko Muller

It's the supply chain, not finance, that sets the rules here; the idea that flight platforms define visa requirements is an oversimplification.
Much like warehouse management software does not dictate customs standards of a country, it simply integrates them.
Passports and visas are sovereign access barriers, established for national security, immigration, or foreign policy reasons.
Platforms are aggregators, they display existing information but do not create or modify these regulatory constraints.
For example, Skyscanner does not decide if a Canadian citizen needs a visa to enter China; it is the Chinese government that does, and the platform informs.

Bad question, whether fiction inspires more than guides; let's rather see where the true triggers of travel are. Inspiration does not always come from a film or a novel, but often from a practical need or an unexpected discovery in an old dusty guide from grandma. In Italy, people don't just leave because they saw a film, but because they found a guide talking about a hidden agriturismo in Puglia, that's the reality. Guides are a source of concrete ideas and feasible plans, showing secret beaches and real trattorias, which fiction will never do.

Their most strong version claims that travel inspiration mainly comes from fiction, with guides being just logistical tools. However, this reading does not always reflect the lived reality for many. A tourist guide is not just a manual for validation after inspiration but can itself trigger the desire. Many, flipping through a Routard or a Lonely Planet, discover unexpected destinations or cultural aspects that create the impulse to travel. For example, I know colleagues who decided to visit Tasmania after seeing photos or descriptions of hikes in a thematic guide, long before a film pushed them there. The rigid distinction between "initial impulse" and "validation" is often too simplistic, as inspiration can quite naturally arise from reading a guide.