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Community-run festivals are an emerging giant in the tourism industry. Nowadays many local festivals have emerged with the specific objectives of celebrating local culinary traditions, establishing business and trade of local products and developing sustainable destinations. Local events can influence the destination image, enabling the growth of tourist flows and stimulate destination marketing organizations to differentiate their own destination products from those of competitors. Two main aspects are analyzed: the main characteristics of local events and the influence of local festival on destination image. Moreover, the economic impact of festivals on the community and the main tourism management strategies adopted by managers are investigated. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications deriving from the chapter are discussed.

Considering the economic potential of festivals to Creative Tourism, this chapter discusses the potential of the small-scale ones for rural development. It reviews worldwide small-scale festivals and engages them with creative activities, presenting the results of some of the small-scale festivals that occur in Southern Europe. It explores the impacts of a small-scale festival on the development of a medium-sized city or a rural area and the challenges they must face in the future. Furthermore, it deals with what kind of new offer can be developed in order to make these territories more sustainable. In this context, Southern Europe plays an important role due to its rich historical heritage that can diversify the offer and the type of experience, being an excellent opportunity to promote the preservation of those at risk of disappearing. This chapter uses primary and secondary data. A geodatabase was created to understand South European festivals on Creative Tourism. Examples from Italy, Greece, Slovenia and Portugal were analysed.

The issues surrounding the scholarship on children-inclusive events management are explored in depth to provide a context for this chapter. Focus then turns to the city of Winchester in the United Kingdom as a case study for potential events aimed at this age group. Through a synthesis of the findings from a thorough new research study along with emerging theories in narrative and storytelling as experience co-creation, a proposed design for a new event is put forward. It is hoped that this approach in the academic literature will encourage other researchers to include innovative proposals in their synthesis and conclusions. Finally, additional considerations of integrating city branding with a wider regional branding are explored through ethnobotany. Lessons are drawn from an example of brand management based on a city event for children in Scotland.

This chapter discusses emerging issues in event management with a focus on small-scale events. The author reflects on managerial approaches to stakeholder involvement and engagement, and underlines the complexity of strategy formulation for destination development planning. This contribution also provides advanced conceptual instruments for event marketing as guiding principles that permeate destination-marketing strategies. In addition, the author investigates the role and nature of sponsorship linked to enhancing the value of small-scale events and highlights fundamental issues in developing a marketing management model for place marketing and the key drivers of event management strategies involving sponsors and event participants.

An extant scale concerning festival performance (FESTPERF) was developed to measure service quality perceptions of attendees to an Australian jazz and blues festival. Despite its noted applicability to music festivals, the study by Tkaczynski and Stokes (2010) focused on one festival of a particular type, and the generalizability of its findings to multiple special events and nonmusic events remains untested. To address these research limitations, this study applied FESTPERF to a theater performance and a film festival. One-hundred and sixty valid responses were collected and analyzed using exploratory factor analysis. It was identified that three factors, human service, venue, and performance, represented attendees’ perception of service quality at these special events. The performance factor was also significantly related to satisfaction and repurchase intent. Results from this study provided justification for the usage of the items proposed in the FESTPERF instrument to be applied to different special event settings with some minor modifications. Opportunities for future research are outlined and the limitations of this study are also provided.

Arts festivals use projects to showcase creative works, configuring a creative field, whether locally, regionally or internationally, by whom engages and attends to the arts festival: artists, funders, media and audiences. This study compares the Edinburgh and Berlin arts festivals founded after World War II. Each city began with a founding festival. Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama sought to reconcile and heal international relations whereas the Berlin International Film Festival sought to showcase free expression and democracy. Both founding festivals were internationally oriented, as seen in their names. Each city added festivals over time and engaged in distinct temporal strategies and configured different creative fields. Edinburgh’s additional festivals entrained to its founding festival, synchronizing in time and place five festivals which led to greater duration and intensity of the experience and configured an international creative field: artists, media, and audiences who attended and engaged with the city festivals. In contrast, Berlin’s founding Film festival, which was internationally oriented, was followed by festivals that were treated as distinct, scheduling each festival sequentially across a yearly calendar and configuring a creative field regionally oriented around Germanic language and culture. Thus, a city’s temporal strategies for arts festivals may configure international, regional and local creative fields, changing who comprises the field to interact.

This chapter explores the potential of social media in the context of festivals and shows how web platforms can better inform event managers’ understanding of how a festival’s social atmosphere (i.e. the socialscape) can be extended online and beyond the actual periods of the staging of a festival. This is possible as social media can help to build an online environment that favours social identification and user engagement. To illustrate such a mechanism, the chapter presents a multi-method analysis of Fotografia Europea, a photography festival held in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Results show the potential of a coordinated web and social media strategy for enhancing the festival’s atmosphere in terms of social identification and engagement.

The ‘Essence of Wine’ is the largest wine event that is held in Porto, Portugal. Therefore, this chapter explains how the tourists (domestic and foreign visitors), as well as local residents and exhibitors can influence the level of satisfaction of the event. The authors discuss about the tourists’ satisfaction. They suggest that satisfied tourists would be interested in returning to the event in the following years. In conclusion, this contribution implies that the loyal visitors and their positive publicity of the ‘Essence of Wine’ can improve the brand image of the event and of the destination.

Events are social, sporty, cultural, economic and environmental or entertainment-based. They are held on specific dates and times to share common experiences. Event tourism is becoming more and more important, bringing many benefits to the destinations. National and international events are organised to create alternative tourism products, increase the number of visitors, contribute to economic development and create competitive advantage, improve the infrastructure of the destination, increase the quality of life and provide socio-cultural development support. Direct or indirect communication is important for the target audience. Today, event organisers, who want to establish strong ties with the target audience, benefit from technology as it helps to promote the event and motivate people to participate in it. Along with the development of the Internet and the social media, communication and marketing implementations have also changed. High-budgeted events are becoming an important segment of tourism. The development of technology and widespread use of the Internet and social media have added a creative and indispensable competitive element to event marketing communication.

This chapter is part of a strand of studies dedicated to tourism events and territorial marketing strategies and focuses on the role of communication in an event-based strategy. Events can attract tourist flows, spread the territorial image, stimulate investment, and contribute to the territorial brand. Therefore, their role becomes increasingly important for an effective territorial and tourism marketing strategy. In the events sector, communication plays a key role in shaping marketing policies, which increasingly involve interaction between actors and the use of technology. To build and communicate an event is essential to implement social media marketing strategies that foster sharing of content that significantly influences user behavior. However, the academic literature on the role of social media in event management is limited. Therefore, this study has a twofold objective: to conduct a review of the literature to systematize and contextualize existing knowledge and to identify the main benefits and risks involved in the use of social networks in events.