There’s a certain kind of arithmetic every family does at the kitchen table in July. School starts soon. The summer went too fast. One more trip would be perfect — but the budget has opinions. Along most of the American coastline, that math gets ugly in a hurry. On the Grand Strand, it has always worked out a little differently, and now one of the country’s most trusted travel publications has put a number on it.

Travel + Leisure has ranked Myrtle Beach No. 8 on its list of the 10 Most Affordable Places to Travel in the U.S. this August — a national roundup of destinations where a round-trip flight and a night’s hotel stay average under $500. Myrtle Beach came in at $486, sharing the list with big names like Orlando, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Austin.

Look closer at the list and something stands out: among all ten destinations, Myrtle Beach is the only true beach town on the Atlantic. The others are cities — wonderful ones, many of them sweltering through triple-digit August heat — while the Grand Strand offers sixty miles of ocean, a breeze off the water, and the whole last-blast-of-summer package at a price that made a national value list.

Here’s what the recognition covers, what Travel + Leisure singled out, and how to turn that headline number into an even better real-world vacation.

The Ranking: No. 8 in America at $486

The list, published by Travel + Leisure in June 2026, wasn’t a matter of opinion — it was built on data. Working from Kayak flight and hotel searches conducted May 1–26, 2026, for travel throughout August, the publication identified the U.S. destinations where average round-trip airfare plus an average one-night hotel stay came in under $500. Kayak’s travel trends team noted that travelers can save up to nine percent on domestic flights by pushing their trip later in the season rather than fighting the peak-summer weeks — which is exactly the window this list captures.

Myrtle Beach’s $486 figure earned it the No. 8 spot nationally. The publication pointed to the destination’s mix of attractions, entertainment, dining, and accommodations — and specifically called out a destination-wide promotion that sweetens the deal further (more on that below).

For a beach destination to make a national affordability list during summer, when coastal prices traditionally peak, says something about how the Grand Strand is built: a deep supply of places to stay, an airport with nonstop service from more than 50 cities keeping fares competitive, and a tourism economy that has always treated value as a point of pride rather than a compromise.

The Full Top 10: Where Myrtle Beach Landed

Here’s the complete Travel + Leisure ranking, with each destination’s average combined cost for a round-trip flight and one-night hotel stay:

Read down that column of city skylines and desert heat, and the Grand Strand entry does its own quiet advertising. Fort Lauderdale is the only other place on the list where the ocean is part of the bargain — and even there, August means South Florida’s rainy season. On the Carolina coast, August means warm water, long evenings, and summer refusing to end just yet.

What Travel + Leisure Highlighted

Beyond the price tag, the publication painted a picture longtime visitors will recognize instantly: long August days spent hopping between the boardwalk, the arcades, the mini-golf courses, and the beach bars, with the waterfront entertainment districts anchoring the evenings.

Two of those anchor districts got named specifically. Broadway at the Beach, the sprawling complex around Lake Broadway in Myrtle Beach, needs little introduction — dining, shopping, nightlife, and attractions in one walkable loop. The second one sits right here in North Myrtle Beach: Barefoot Landing, the waterfront district along the Intracoastal Waterway in the Windy Hill section, where boardwalk-style shopping and restaurants share the property with the House of Blues and Alabama Theatre. For guests staying on the north end of the Strand, national-magazine-worthy entertainment is a five-minute hop from the beach chair.

The article also gave nods to Ripley’s Aquarium of Myrtle Beach as the classic cool-off-indoors move for families, The Carolina Opry for its dinner-show tradition, and the area’s steadily expanding dining scene — from seafood shacks and Southern staples to newer arrivals like Ole Smoky Distillery. It’s a fair snapshot of a destination where the entertainment inventory runs deeper than any single trip can cover; our full guide to things to do in Myrtle Beach picks up where the magazine left off.

Make More Myrtle Moments: The Deal Behind the Ranking

One detail in the Travel + Leisure write-up deserves its own spotlight: the publication specifically credited Visit Myrtle Beach’s “Make More Myrtle Moments” promotion as a reason August is one of the best times to score a Grand Strand beach deal. The destination-wide campaign bundles offers like extra free nights at participating hotels and resorts across the 60-mile coastline, giving late-summer travelers more vacation for the same budget.

That’s destination marketing doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — and it’s worth pausing on why a national magazine mention like this matters. Third-party recognition from a publication travelers already trust carries a weight no advertisement can buy. When Travel + Leisure tells its readers the Grand Strand delivers value, it reinforces what has always been one of this coast’s strongest competitive advantages, and it reaches travelers at the precise moment they’re weighing where their late-summer dollars go furthest.

For the area’s hotels, restaurants, attractions, and small businesses, that visibility ripples outward all season long. For you, the traveler, it’s simpler: the deals are real, they’re publicized, and August is when they stack up.

Why August Is the Grand Strand’s Best-Kept Value Secret

Locals have known this rhythm for years. The Fourth of July crest passes, the back-to-school calendars start thinning the crowds week by week, and the beach itself doesn’t get the memo — the ocean is at its warmest of the entire year, the days are still long, and the evening air finally softens. By mid-August, you can walk a stretch of Cherry Grove sand at nine in the morning and count the other footprints.

Meanwhile, the economics tilt in the traveler’s favor. Airfares ease as the peak-summer scramble fades — and with Myrtle Beach International connecting nonstop to more than 50 cities, there’s healthy competition keeping those fares honest. Accommodation rates follow the same slope, promotions like Make More Myrtle Moments kick in, and restaurants that required patience in July welcome you right in come August.

Then there’s the calendar. Late summer on the Grand Strand stays busy with live music, fireworks nights, and festival season warming up — the Myrtle Beach events calendar is the place to see what’s on during your week. The destination that Travel + Leisure priced at $486 doesn’t act like a bargain when you’re standing in it.

How to Stretch That Value Even Further

The magazine’s math was built on flights and hotel nights — the standard yardstick for a national comparison. But here’s where a little local knowledge improves on a national headline: for families and groups, a vacation rental often rewrites that equation entirely.

Think about what the hotel model costs a family of six for a week: multiple rooms, every breakfast and lunch out, and everyone living out of suitcases. Now put that same family in an oceanfront rental in North Myrtle Beach. One shared home instead of two or three hotel rooms. A full kitchen that turns breakfast into a $12 grocery run instead of a $70 restaurant tab. A washer and dryer that let everyone pack half as much. Beach chairs and boogie boards already in the garage. Multiply those savings across seven days, and the per-person, per-night cost of a beach week frequently undercuts the hotel route — while delivering more space, more privacy, and the ocean outside the window.

Where you land along the coast shapes the trip, too. Cherry Grove Beach brings the fishing pier and calm, family-friendly channels at the north end. Ocean Drive puts Main Street’s shag clubs and beach-music history within walking distance. Crescent Beach offers wide, quiet sand in the middle of it all, and Windy Hill sits closest to Barefoot Landing — the very district Travel + Leisure name-checked — and the quickest run down to the Myrtle Beach attractions.

An affordable destination, in its most affordable month, with the lodging strategy that stretches a budget furthest. That’s not settling for less vacation. That’s simply doing the kitchen-table math better than everyone else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Book the Beach That Made the List

Travel + Leisure just told the whole country what Grand Strand regulars have known for generations: this coast delivers a real beach vacation at a price that makes sense. The smartest way to claim it is with a home base that stretches every dollar. Thomas Beach Vacations offers oceanfront home rentals where the whole family shares one roof, one kitchen, and one unbeatable view, along with oceanfront condos sized right for couples and smaller crews — across all four North Myrtle Beach sections, with August availability and some of the season’s friendliest rates. Browse availability at www.northmyrtlebeachvacations.com or call our local team at (843) 273-3001 — and squeeze one more week of summer out of the most affordable stretch of beach in America.

Sources: Travel + Leisure, “10 Most Affordable Places to Travel in the U.S. This August” (June 2026, based on Kayak search data); Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce / Visit Myrtle Beach.

Every so often, the rest of the country gets a glimpse of what Grand Strand locals wake up to every morning. Sometimes it’s a postcard shot in a magazine spread. Sometimes it’s a puzzle board on a game show. And on the afternoon of June 9, it was Kelly Clarkson’s studio audience watching the SkyWheel turn against a Carolina-blue sky — sixty miles of coastline compressed into a few minutes of national daytime television.

Myrtle Beach landed a coveted feature on The Kelly Clarkson Show this summer, courtesy of nationally recognized travel expert Emily Kaufman — better known to millions of viewers as The Travel Mom. The segment, which aired June 9 as the finale of her South Carolina coastal road trip series, spotlighted the destination’s family-friendly attractions, oceanfront atmosphere, and famous affordability to an audience of potential travelers from coast to coast.

And Kaufman didn’t just talk about the beach — she brought it into the studio. After wrapping her road trip on the Grand Strand, she surprised two lucky audience members with a $10,000 Myrtle Beach getaway, courtesy of the segment’s sponsor, Take 5. Somewhere out there, two very happy families are packing beach bags right now.

Here’s what the feature covered, why placements like this one keep the Grand Strand in the national spotlight, and how to see everything the cameras captured for yourself — with a quieter home base just up the coast.

What Aired on June 9: The Travel Mom’s South Carolina Road Trip

The Myrtle Beach feature came as the closing chapter of a South Carolina coastal road trip series Kaufman produced for the show — a journey that wound its way along the Palmetto State’s shoreline before finishing where so many family road trips do: on the Grand Strand. The format suited the destination perfectly. Myrtle Beach has always been, at heart, a road trip town — the place families from Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and half of the eastern seaboard have been steering toward for generations, coolers packed and radio on.

Visit Myrtle Beach, the area’s destination marketing organization, supported the production with coordination, local logistics, and video assets that helped bring the region to life on screen — the kind of behind-the-scenes teamwork that turns a few minutes of airtime into a genuine showcase.

The studio moment sealed it. Kaufman returned from the road to Kelly Clarkson’s stage and handed two audience members a $10,000 Myrtle Beach vacation, turning a travel segment into the kind of feel-good giveaway daytime television does best — and putting the words “Myrtle Beach” on the lips of everyone watching at home.

Who Is The Travel Mom?

If you’ve watched morning or daytime television at any point in the last three decades, you’ve likely met Emily Kaufman. A pioneer of the family travel beat, she has spent roughly thirty years helping households plan accessible, affordable, memorable vacations — appearing regularly on Good Morning America, The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CBS Mornings, and CNN, and currently serving as the travel correspondent for The Kelly Clarkson Show.

That résumé matters for a simple reason: trust. When The Travel Mom tells a national audience that a destination delivers for families — real value, real variety, something for the grandparents and the toddlers alike — travelers listen. It’s third-party validation from one of the most familiar voices in family travel, and Myrtle Beach earned the nod.

Her verdict echoed what generations of returning visitors already know. The Grand Strand’s combination of wide public beaches, attraction-packed entertainment districts, and vacation costs that don’t require a second mortgage has kept it among America’s most visited beach destinations year after year.

What the Feature Showcased

The segment leaned into the icons — the places that define the Myrtle Beach skyline and fill a family’s first-day itinerary.

The Myrtle Beach Boardwalk

The 1.2-mile oceanfront promenade is the destination’s front porch — a stroll past arcades, souvenir shops, ice cream windows, and the sound of waves that never quite leaves the background. It’s the Myrtle Beach that lives in family photo albums, and it photographs just as well for television.

The SkyWheel

Rising nearly 200 feet above the Boardwalk, the SkyWheel is the coast’s unmistakable landmark — climate-controlled glass gondolas turning slowly over the Atlantic, with views that stretch up and down the Strand. When a TV producer needs one shot that says “Myrtle Beach,” this is the one they reach for.

Broadway at the Beach

The sprawling entertainment complex around Lake Broadway packs dining, shopping, nightlife, and attractions into one walkable district — the rare place where a family of four with four different opinions can all get their way in a single evening.

Ripley’s Aquarium of Myrtle Beach

Anchoring Broadway at the Beach, Ripley’s Aquarium sends visitors along a moving glidepath through an underwater tunnel while sharks and rays sail overhead — reliably the moment when even the teenagers put their phones down. It’s a staple of rainy-day plans and hot-afternoon escapes alike, and a natural pick for a family-focused travel feature.

Beyond the marquee names, the segment captured the thing that’s harder to put in a listicle: the oceanfront atmosphere itself. The wide sand, the pier silhouettes, the particular gold of a Grand Strand evening — the reasons people don’t just visit once.

A Big Year for Myrtle Beach on National Television

The Kelly Clarkson Show feature didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Just a month earlier, Wheel of Fortune devoted an entire week of programming to the destination — Myrtle Beach Family Week, which aired May 4–8, 2026, with family teams competing for prizes that included Myrtle Beach trips, plus a companion sweepstakes that sent five winning families on five-night Grand Strand vacations.

There’s a lovely bit of hometown poetry in that one: Wheel of Fortune’s own Vanna White grew up right here in North Myrtle Beach, and the giveaway invited viewers to come explore her hometown. For a game show watched by millions every weeknight, that’s a full week of the Grand Strand glowing on America’s living room screens.

Put the year’s placements side by side and the pattern is clear:

Two nationally syndicated shows, back to back, both choosing the same stretch of South Carolina coastline as their family-vacation shorthand. In a tourism marketplace where every beach town in America is competing for attention, that’s not luck — it’s a destination whose story keeps proving easy to tell.

Why National TV Coverage Matters for Your Vacation

It’s fair to ask what a talk show segment has to do with your beach week. More than you’d think, actually — and mostly in good ways.

National features introduce the destination to first-time travelers, sure. But they also work on everyone who’s been here before — the family that came in 2019 and keeps meaning to come back, the couple who honeymooned here and wonders if the kids would love it. A trusted voice like The Travel Mom saying “this place delivers” is often the nudge that turns someday into this summer. That awareness ripples outward to the hotels, attractions, restaurants, and small businesses that make up the Grand Strand’s tourism economy — the same ecosystem that keeps the area’s restaurant scene deep, its attractions fresh, and its calendar full.

For visitors, the practical takeaway is timing. Exposure like this tends to show up in demand, especially for summer and early fall. The families who watched that June 9 segment and started planning are booking now — which makes this a smart moment to lock in your own dates rather than waiting for the shoulder-season scramble. Our Myrtle Beach events calendar is a good place to pick your week; the full menu of things to do in Myrtle Beach will fill it.

Seeing the TV-Famous Spots from North Myrtle Beach

Here’s the local’s secret the cameras rarely linger on: you don’t have to stay in the middle of the spotlight to enjoy it. North Myrtle Beach sits about fifteen miles up the coast from the Boardwalk and SkyWheel — close enough for an easy evening outing, far enough that you come home to a quieter stretch of sand, a slower pace, and the kind of beach where your morning coffee comes with more pelicans than people.

Every one of the featured attractions is a straightforward drive down Highway 17 or the Highway 31 bypass. Spend an afternoon at Ripley’s Aquarium and Broadway at the Beach, ride the SkyWheel at dusk when the coast lights up beneath you, walk the Boardwalk with ice cream in hand — then point the car north and trade the bright lights for the sound of the surf outside your window.

Each of North Myrtle Beach’s four sections makes a fine base camp for it. Cherry Grove Beach offers its fishing pier and famously calm, family-friendly waters at the north end. Ocean Drive brings its own slice of television-worthy Americana — Main Street, the shag clubs, and beach music history (this is Vanna White’s hometown turf, after all). Crescent Beach and Windy Hill sit closest to the Myrtle Beach attractions, shaving minutes off the drive to Broadway at the Beach while keeping the wide, relaxed sand that defines the north end of the Strand.

Frequently Asked Questions

See What the Cameras Saw — Then Stay Where the Locals Would

Millions of viewers just discovered what you may already suspect: the Grand Strand delivers a family beach vacation that’s hard to beat. The next move is making it yours. Thomas Beach Vacations offers oceanfront home rentals with room for the whole crew and oceanfront condos perfect for smaller families — across all four North Myrtle Beach sections, each an easy drive from the Boardwalk, SkyWheel, and Broadway at the Beach, and each with the ocean waiting right outside your door. Browse availability at www.northmyrtlebeachvacations.com or call our local team at (843) 273-3001 — and turn the vacation everyone saw on TV into the one your family actually takes.

Sources: Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce / Visit Myrtle Beach announcement; The Kelly Clarkson Show (NBC, aired June 9, 2026); Wheel of Fortune Myrtle Beach Family Week official promotion (May 2026).

Lights, Camera, Grand Strand: Myrtle Beach Is Becoming a Film Industry Hub

There has always been something cinematic about the Grand Strand. The way morning light slips sideways across the Atlantic and catches the lip of a wave. The Spanish moss hanging still and silver over old plantation oaks. The way Ocean Boulevard in North Myrtle Beach hums on a summer Friday night with neon and laughter and the smell of salt and sunscreen. People have been coming here for generations to feel something — and it turns out that what makes a place feel worth visiting also makes it worth filming.

With a film currently in production along the Grand Strand, the Myrtle Beach area is drawing attention from an industry that tends to be selective about where it sets up its equipment. And this is not a one-time thing. Visit Myrtle Beach — the area’s official tourism marketing organization — is actively working to position the coastal region as a bona fide destination for film and television production. The conversations happening right now between producers, local officials, and tourism leaders could reshape how the world first encounters this stretch of South Carolina coastline.

For visitors planning a trip to Myrtle Beach or North Myrtle Beach, this development is worth paying attention to. A rising film profile changes a destination — it brings new visitors, new energy, and a kind of cultural credibility that no marketing campaign can manufacture. Here is what is happening, why it matters, and what it might mean the next time you look out at the ocean from a North Myrtle Beach vacation rental balcony.

A Coastline Worth Putting on Camera

The Grand Strand is sixty miles of coastline, but that phrase alone doesn’t capture what makes it visually remarkable. Within a short drive of Myrtle Beach’s famous oceanfront, a film crew can find settings that most coastal destinations simply cannot offer. There are wide, windswept beaches where the horizon seems to stretch past the edge of the frame. There is the Intracoastal Waterway threading through marshland that turns gold at dusk. There are waterfront communities in North Myrtle Beach — Cherry Grove, Windy Hill, Crescent Beach — where fishing boats bob beside vacation homes and the local rhythm of life has not been entirely consumed by tourism.

Move inland and the landscape shifts again. Working farms dot Horry County. Antebellum plantation properties with their broad verandas and live oak canopies offer a visual contrast to the coast that is striking on screen. The rice fields of the Georgetown area, just south of Myrtle Beach, carry a weight of history that few settings in the American South can match. All of this — beach, waterway, farmland, antebellum architecture — sits within 15 to 20 minutes of each other. For a production manager trying to minimize company moves between locations, that kind of geographic density is extremely valuable.

Why Producers Are Choosing the Grand Strand

Film production is a logistical enterprise as much as a creative one. A location that looks beautiful in a photo may become impractical the moment you try to park three grip trucks, source a catering operation that can feed eighty people twice a day, and find hotel rooms for a cast and crew on short notice. The Grand Strand handles all of those demands with relative ease — which is one of the core reasons producers are beginning to look seriously at the area.

The accommodation infrastructure here is enormous. The Myrtle Beach area has tens of thousands of hotel rooms, vacation rentals, and resort properties. North Myrtle Beach vacation rentals through Thomas Beach Vacations offer extended-stay options ranging from oceanfront condos to large beach houses that can accommodate multiple crew members under one roof — the kind of flexible lodging a production company on a multi-week shoot genuinely needs. That scale of inventory, outside of peak summer season, means a production crew is not competing with a convention and a family reunion for the same rooms.

The restaurants and vendors along the Grand Strand round out the picture. A production crew of fifty-plus people eating and spending daily at local establishments like Nacho Hippo, Sea Captain’s House, or Filet’s Restaurant in North Myrtle Beach adds up quickly. The area has the dining depth and retail variety to sustain that kind of prolonged economic engagement without strain.

How Visit Myrtle Beach Supports Film Productions

Landing a film production is not purely a matter of a location looking good on a scout. There is a bureaucratic reality to every shoot — permits, insurance requirements, coordination with local government, and the constant logistical scramble that any large traveling operation requires. Visit Myrtle Beach has positioned itself as the connector between incoming productions and the local resources that make a shoot feasible.

That means helping production crews navigate the permitting process — which varies by location along the Grand Strand and can be a significant barrier for out-of-area crews unfamiliar with the regional landscape. It also means connecting crews with local vendors: hotels, florists, caterers, equipment suppliers, and the other behind-the-scenes businesses that a production depends on but rarely considers until they are actually on the ground and the shooting clock is ticking. That kind of concierge-level navigation through a community’s infrastructure is exactly what makes a destination attractive to repeat productions.

Visit Myrtle Beach has also announced plans to launch a dedicated website later this year with specific information for those interested in filming along the Grand Strand. That kind of targeted resource signals a long-term commitment to the film sector — not a one-off accommodation, but an evolving infrastructure built to welcome production work year after year.

The Off-Season Economic Boost Nobody Is Talking About

Every coastal tourism community wrestles with seasonality. The Grand Strand is no exception. Between Labor Day and Memorial Day, hotel occupancy dips, restaurants trim their hours, and the workforce that powers the summer economy either waits or migrates. Film production does not follow a beach calendar, and that is precisely its value as an off-season economic driver.

The production currently underway along the Grand Strand illustrates the model clearly. A six-week shoot with more than fifty crew members means six weeks of hotel stays, restaurant meals, gas station stops, grocery runs, and retail spending — all in a period when those same businesses might otherwise be quiet. That is not vacation-industry money; it is production-industry money, which runs on a different schedule and responds to different incentives. Attracting even a handful of productions per year, particularly in the shoulder seasons, creates a meaningful economic buffer for the local community.

There is also the local talent dimension. The Myrtle Beach area has a community of people who work in film, television, and commercial production — camera operators, production assistants, makeup artists, location scouts, and others who often have to travel far from home to find consistent work. When productions choose the Grand Strand, they typically prioritize hiring local talent when available. That keeps money and expertise within the community and builds the kind of local production ecosystem that makes future shoots more attractive and more efficient.

Set Jetting: When the Screen Sends Travelers to the Shore

There is a travel trend that has been gaining momentum over the past several years, and it has a name that sounds like it was coined in a marketing meeting but describes something genuinely real: set jetting. It is the habit of seeking out the actual locations where a film or television show was filmed — not a theme park approximation, but the real street, the real beach, the real diner where a favorite scene was shot. For destinations lucky enough to be featured in a widely seen production, the effect on tourism can be substantial and long-lasting.

Think about how the Outer Banks of North Carolina became a magnet for a certain kind of young traveler after the Netflix series of the same name found its audience. The connection between a screen story and a real place is powerful precisely because it is personal — viewers form an emotional relationship with a setting before they ever visit, and when they finally arrive, the place carries a resonance that purely promotional content cannot manufacture.

For Myrtle Beach, the promise of set jetting is significant. A viewer in Chicago who watches a film set against the backdrop of the Grand Strand’s ocean and marshes and beach bars may have never considered a South Carolina vacation. But a well-told story filmed in a compelling place has a way of making the abstract feel concrete, and the concrete feel like somewhere worth going. That is a kind of marketing reach that no tourism budget can fully buy.

South Carolina’s Film Legacy — and What It Means for Myrtle Beach

South Carolina is not new to the film industry. The state has served as a backdrop for some of the most recognized titles in American cinema and television. The Notebook, with its sweeping Lowcountry visuals, was filmed partly along the South Carolina coast. Forrest Gump passed through the state’s landscape on its cross-country journey. The Righteous Gemstones, HBO’s darkly comic look at a televangelist dynasty, has used South Carolina locations season after season. And Outer Banks — the Netflix series that helped define coastal drama for a generation of streaming viewers — drew heavily on South Carolina geography for its production.

What is new is that the South Carolina Film Commission has begun specifically recommending the Myrtle Beach area as a filming location. That institutional endorsement matters. Productions looking at South Carolina for the first time will now encounter Myrtle Beach on the official list of recommended locations — which means it is in the conversation at the earliest stage of a location search, rather than discovered as an afterthought.

What the Grand Strand Offers That Other SC Locations Don’t

Charleston has long been the state’s most filmed city, and it deserves its reputation. But Charleston’s historic district comes with significant restrictions, high permit complexity, and intense tourist foot traffic that can complicate location shooting. The Grand Strand offers something different: equivalent scenic variety with a more flexible logistical environment, a larger accommodation base, and a regional culture genuinely invested in welcoming the production industry.

The mix of events and seasonal activity along the Grand Strand also means that a production filming in the area can capture authentic crowd energy when it needs it, and find near-solitude in the off-season when a quieter setting serves the story better. That flexibility is rare and genuinely useful.

What Film Tourism Could Look Like Along the Grand Strand

If the Grand Strand’s film profile continues to grow — and the current trajectory suggests it will — the experience of visiting Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach may eventually include a layer of film tourism that doesn’t yet exist. That could mean guided location tours through spots featured in local productions. It could mean pop-up exhibits at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center or along Main Street in North Myrtle Beach around a film’s release. It could mean the kind of film festival programming that draws a different traveler demographic — one interested in cinema as much as the coast — and that tends to support a more year-round tourism economy.

Cherry Grove Pier in North Myrtle Beach. Barefoot Landing, with its waterfront dining and entertainment. The broad flat expanse of Huntington Beach State Park, just south of Murrells Inlet. The weathered character of downtown Conway, Horry County’s seat, with its riverfront brick buildings. These are locations that already draw visitors for their own merits. In a film tourism context, they become something more — destination stops on a journey shaped by story as much as scenery.

It is worth remembering that Myrtle Beach’s appeal to travelers has always been grounded in the way the place makes people feel. A film can deliver that feeling to an audience that has never crossed the state line into South Carolina. And once someone has felt it — even through a screen — the pull to experience it directly tends to be hard to resist. That is the deeper promise of the Grand Strand’s emerging film identity, and it is one that travelers who love this coast should be paying attention to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Whether you are coming to the Grand Strand because a film brought it to your attention or because you have been making the drive down Highway 17 for decades, North Myrtle Beach is ready to welcome you. Thomas Beach Vacations has been helping families, couples, and groups find their ideal place on this coast for years — oceanfront condos, spacious beach houses, and everything in between. When you are ready to plan your visit, give us a call at (866) 249-2100 or browse available properties at northmyrtlebeachvacations.com. The Grand Strand is having a moment — and there is no better time to be here for it.