ABSTRACT

Tourism is consistently seen as one of the key objectives of events, providing broad economic benefits and justifying stakeholder involvement and funding. This chapter considers how a wide range of tourism destinations are increasingly utilizing events as an integral part of their strategic planning. It is important to begin with two important qualifications regarding how we see events. The first is that the term ‘events’ covers a wide range of activities and occurrences. This is recognized in the common typologies, which are based on scale (for example mega, hallmark, small, community) or subject (for example sporting, business, commemorative, cultural, exhibition). With such a complexity, we must be careful not to over-generalize. Instead, it is important to recognize that the tourism dimension of events may vary quite widely from case to case. The second qualification is that in focusing on tourism we should not forget that this is only

one reason for staging events. Tourism may only be one of a number of objectives and it may not be the main one. For some events, social objectives – such as building national or community identity or communicating persuasive messages – are more important. A good example of this is London’s Notting Hill Carnival. Though it attracts a very large audience, including many tourists, it started as (and remains) primarily a celebration of the identity of the West Indian diaspora (Burr 2006). For some commercial events, such as exhibitions, selling participants’ wares may be the first priority. Indeed, there are some events (for example religious or local) in which tourism is irrelevant.