In many destinations, events, including business events, form a fundamental component of the destination’s tourism and business strategy. As well as providing opportunities to increase direct expenditure at a destination, events can also contribute substantially to a destination’s range of tourist attractions, facilitate media coverage for the destination, promote awareness of the destination for future visitation and lead to the construction of new facilities and infrastructure.
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In many destinations, events, including business events, form a fundamental component of the destination’s tourism and business strategy. As well as providing opportunities to increase direct expenditure at a destination, events can also contribute substantially to a destination’s range of tourist attractions, facilitate media coverage for the destination, promote awareness of the destination for future visitation and lead to the construction of new facilities and infrastructure.
The prominence given to events by governments and marketing organisations has resulted in some destinations seeking to specialise in the creation and hosting of events. There is also a trend towards the construction of ‘mega-venues’ catering for conventions, trade shows, art and sporting events.
The business events sector in particular is increasingly being recognised as a high-yield component of the industry with direct connectivity into broader areas such as trade, foreign affairs, education, science, training and communications.
Events increase the opportunities for new expenditure within a host region by attracting visitors to the region. The proliferation of events, and event-producing agencies, has also resulted in the need for the performance of events to be evaluated. Event managers and planners are being called upon more often to prepare event evaluations with detailed accounts of the impacts of events.
Whilst events can result in positive economic impacts, they also have the potential to result in economic losses, create conflict within the host community, and tarnish the reputation of a destination, especially if they do not have strong local support. As such, there needs to be thorough evaluation of the costs and benefits they produce to assess their overall impact, including their return on public funding in many cases.
For events to be truly successful it is essential that stakeholders adopt a holistic approach to impact evaluation across a range of economic, environmental and social criteria. Triple Bottom Line (TBL) evaluation will increasingly be the barometer by which the success of events will be determined.
Sustainable Tourism Online contains a range of research and tools relating to the planning, evaluation and contribution of events, including business events, relative to destinations and organisations.
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