Event tourism
Event tourism is a specialized sector of tourism focused on attracting visitors through planned events, such as sporting tournaments, conventions, or cultural festivals. These events can range from large-scale spectacles like the Olympic Games to smaller local gatherings, all designed to promote the host location and boost its appeal as a tourist destination. By leveraging these events, organizers aim to generate both immediate financial benefits and long-term tourism growth through increased community pride and repeat visitation.
Successful event tourism requires collaboration among local governments, businesses, and event planners, ensuring that logistics, infrastructure, and marketing align to accommodate visitors effectively. Moreover, the distinction between event tourists—those who stay overnight—and event visitors—who attend for part of the day—highlights the varying strategies needed to engage different types of attendees.
Historically, event tourism concepts trace back to ancient gatherings, evolving through the centuries to encompass modern international events. Today, the focus not only involves attracting visitors during the event but also encouraging them to explore the local area, thereby enhancing the broader economic impact on the community. Various models, such as the VICE method, emphasize a balanced approach that considers the needs of visitors, the local industry, the community, and environmental sustainability in event planning.
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Event tourism
Event tourism is a type of tourist promotion centered on a single planned event, such as a sporting tournament, convention, or festival. Some of these events are pre-planned spectacles, such as the Olympic Games or the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, while others are created specifically to promote the attributes of an area. Event tourism seeks to capitalize on such special events to maximize tourist-driven income in both short-term and long-term contexts.
Beyond the immediate financial gains born of event tourism, the organizers of an event have other long-term goals in mind. These include the promotion of the event's host location as an ongoing tourist destination, the creation of a heightened level of community pride, the potential to sponsor future or ongoing annual events, and perhaps most of all, the attraction of repeat visitation from the event's attendees. Event tourism is intimately connected to event management, the process by which any event is planned and produced.
Background
Faced with heightened competition from cities contending for tourist dollars, event tourism has become an increasingly popular mechanism to attract new visitors to a city. Rather than hoping visitors will discover a location on their own, organizers can develop a centerpiece attraction around which to promote traffic and maximize a lasting impact. The most successful incarnations of these events occur with the cooperation of the community, local industry, and government.
The basic ideas of event tourism date back to antiquity. The original Olympic Games of ancient Greece brought together people from a variety of different cultures in a social environment. Festivals such as jousting tournaments and religious celebrations served similar functions in the Middle Ages. Beyond their centerpiece attractions, these events brought added income to local vendors and merchants.
Starting with such international events as the World's Fair (which began in London in 1851) and the Olympic Games (the modern incarnation of which started in Athens in 1896), event tourism began to take on a more international context in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tourism was an important growth industry in many communities. It helped to stimulate economies in both small and large cities.
The concept of event tourism as a specific field of study, however, arose in the late twentieth century. Experts who study the industry differentiate between event tourists and event visitors. Event tourists are those who stay overnight in the host city for at least one night, while event visitors only spend part of a day attending the event. Both offer valuable sources of tourist income, although promoting the event to tourists and visitors may require different tactics.
Overview
Events may be planned either as a consequence of a larger institution that has cities bid for the right to host an event, such as the Olympics or soccer's World Cup, or as a result of the efforts of a local public or private organization to create a community-sponsored event. While larger events tend to draw bigger crowds and bring greater attention to a city's attractions, event tourism is not necessarily limited to large-scale events. Any local event that is used to highlight local amenities and community resources can be regarded as a form of event tourism.
Smaller events, such as a county fair or local festival, may draw from different pools of potential tourists than that of large-scale events, but generally, both types of events have the shared intent of promoting the long-term tourism potential of the host location. Smaller events can be useful in stimulating recognition among locals about the promise of regional institutions like museums and restaurants or natural attractions such as rivers and parks. Local businesses in particular can benefit from the increased foot traffic of smaller events. Larger events have the potential to redefine a community as a tourist destination that people from distant locations spend days or even weeks visiting.
Event tourism requires the cooperation of a number of different professionals working in cooperation with local officials to produce events. Large-scale events like the Olympic Games, political conventions, or music festivals require people with experience to strategically plan them. This aspect of event management is an integral part of event tourism. Event managers must be able to oversee and arrange a variety of different tasks, including managing finances, planning timelines, arranging the event's promotion, and implementing individual happenings. Successful event management requires planners to anticipate and arrange details. This includes research, promotion, planning, organizing, and assessing all aspects of operation. Such events also require planners to consider local infrastructure capacity and hotel availability to ensure that the number of expected visitors can be accommodated properly.
An effective tourist event must be able to maintain continuous and sustainable growth. Further, organizers must be able to differentiate their event from other similar competing festivals and sports tournaments. Often, multitudes of similar programs are staged around the world; organizers must be able to draw unique distinctions to their particular events that enable them to stand out in a crowded tourist industry. The specific highlights of the host location itself can be one way for organizers to promote the distinctiveness of their event.
Organizers must seek to draw tourists away from the grounds of the event if it is to have a lasting effect beyond its immediate duration. This may include unofficial events such as art fairs, community concerts, and food truck rallies that are not necessarily part of the event's official agenda. However, such off-site events offer the community a chance to present a favorable image to tourists and thus promote a desire to return to the host location outside of the event's timeframe. Such initiatives can help expand a city's tourist season. Additionally, promotion of local businesses, hotels, and restaurants can have the mutual effect of creating added business during the event or to create return business on non-festive occasions for people who live in the host city year-round. Creating seasonal events such as snow festivals and sandcastle carnivals are types of special events that may help distribute tourist travel more evenly throughout a calendar year.
Some festival organizers have subscribed to the VICE method of event tourism, which includes four segments to be considered when planning special events: visitors, industry, community, and environment. By using this model, organizers are able to review and serve the interests of both festivalgoers and those with a stake in its success while still respecting and safeguarding the environment in which the event takes place. Industry scholars argue that such assessments must occur on an annual basis so that all partners feel like they have an active role in the continuing development and organization of the event.
Bibliography
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