Just as Oscar Wilde said that he did not want to live in a world where Utopia wasn’t marked on the map, so an increasing number of tourists are opting to travel to destinations which can’t properly be said to fall within the province of conventional geography.

Every year hundreds of thousands of vacationers are drawn to the England of Harry Potter, the Beatles and James Bond, not the more prosaic country of David Cameron, warm beer and bad food.

The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films might as well have been epic travelogues for the New Zealand Tourism Board, so successful have they been in raising awareness of that island nation’s gloriously diverse natural attractions and luring visitors to them.

And aside from exporting potatoes, the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island is almost entirely reliant on the tourism dollars of Japanese aficionados of the classic 1908 book Anne of Green Gables to earn its keep.

What might be termed pop-cultural tourism is hardly a new phenomenon. Since the 1950s fans of director John Ford’s movie The Quiet Man, a cinematic Valentine to a mythical Ireland which could only have ever existed in the imagination of the child of immigrants, have been making pilgrimages to County Mayo where the film was shot.

Bob Marley has made as immeasurable a contribution to Jamaica tourism since his death as he made to that Caribbean country’s music and culture during his lifetime. And for decades Tunisia has attracted Star Wars enthusiasts intent on visiting the desert locations where director George Lucas and production designer John Barry created the setting of the planet Tatooine in that blockbuster 1977 space opera.

Staid, conventional Bermuda, of course, has mostly avoided opportunities to market itself as a state of mind rather than just a geographic location.

True, there are occasional nods to Mark Twain’s long association with the Island in the tourism literature and advertising. But, frankly, the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer author’s affinity for Bermuda and Bermudians is better known and far better publicised in the United States than it is here.

For instance, the current exhibition at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, a National Historic Landmark and selected as one of the ten best historic homes in the world by National Geographic, is entitled “Travel Is Fatal To Prejudice”.

The show is constructed around the celebrated writer and moral philosopher’s wide-ranging travels (he first came to public attention with his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad, a droll account of the very first transatlantic pleasure cruise – a months-long voyage which brought him to Bermuda for the first time).

This exhibit, which will have been seen by tens of thousands of visitors by the time it closes, includes a section devoted to Twain’s final years and his many visits to Bermuda during that period.

Bermuda, which Twain called “the Isles of the Blest” and “the right place for a jaded man to loaf in”, actually played a role in mounting the exhibition. The Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art loaned the Mark Twain House Winslow Homer’s magnificent seascape SS Trinidad, which takes as its subject one of the steamships serving the Island during the twilight of the author’s life, for the length of the show’s run.

Yet this local association with a world-class exhibit has gone uncommented upon – and very probably unnoticed – by Bermuda’s Tourism Authority.

Intent as it is on rebranding and repositioning the Island in the travelling public’s mind, the Tourism Authority really shouldn’t ignore an opportunity to hitch our star to a presentation – and the larger-than-life figure it celebrates – which is attracting widespread international interest. There is more to a Bermuda vacation, after all, than just cliff diving.

There are countless ties to popular culture Bermuda could incorporate into its marketing.

For example, a Bermudian audience was the first in the world to undergo the full Jimi Hendrix experience when that legendary guitarist – described by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music” — was a virtual unknown touring with the Isley Brothers.

“Jimi joined us in the spring of 1964,” the group’s lead singer Ronald Isley has recalled “ … Then we went to Bermuda.

“We played (at the tennis) stadium. We’d been advertised for months, so the place was filled and those who couldn’t get seats were standing on hills overlooking the stadium. It was us and local talent. Our band backed the other acts.

“We were in the dressing room when we heard what sounded like a riot going on and we figured one of the local acts must have made a big hit … But it was Jimi (giving an impromptu solo performance).”

Stayin’ Alive, a song famously described as “The National Anthem of the 1970s”, was largely composed in Bermuda when the Bee Gees were meeting here with long-time manager Robert Stigwood about providing material for the soundtrack of his upcoming disco movie musical Saturday Night Fever (for good measure, the group’s unofficial leader, Barry Gibb, also co-wrote two number one bubblegum hits for teen idol brother Andy Gibb while on the Island that summer: I Just Want To Be Your Everything and Love Is Thicker Than Water remain fixtures on the playlists of FM oldies stations).

And, of course, a number of the songs on John Lennon’s last (although admittedly least interesting) album Double Fantasy owe at least something to the time the former Beatle spent in Bermuda in the summer of 1980.

At a time when there is growing competition for tourism dollars from an increasing number of largely interchangeable islands resorts, it is certainly worth reminding our potential clientele that Bermuda has always been as much an enchanting state of mind as it’s been a popular holiday destination.