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Hosting business events is no longer the preserve of hotels and purpose-built conference and exhibition centres. Today, visitor attractions, theatres, museums, universities and sporting complexes also compete for their share of the lucrative business events sector. However, few of these venues were originally designed and built to accommodate events but are now multipurpose in function and marketed to the events industry to secure a secondary source of income. This paper aims to evaluate the supply and design of venues for business events from both a historical and contemporary viewpoint.

As business events have specific venue requirements, ranging from extensive, accessible space for exhibitions to numerous rooms for plenary and syndicate conference sessions, choosing an appropriate venue from those available has become a considerable task. A review of key moments in history demonstrates how different types of venues have emerged and developed.

This study reveals how venues that have a similar background typically share features such as architectural design and layout. The paper discusses the characteristics of unusual, academic and sporting venues as well as hotels and purpose-built space to include factors such as availability, cost and location.

This paper provides an insight into the benefits and drawbacks of using different types of venues for business events and the advantages and challenges that these present to organisers. Case studies are embedded within this paper, illustrating the range of venues that are used to successfully host business events today. As there is limited literature that explores venue development for events, or commonalities of venue characteristics by type, the synthesis of these two important elements of event management makes this study an original and valuable contribution to the developing literature.

Events feed our desire to connect, celebrate and share experiences. Visiting or taking part in Children's events forms part of many a child's upbringing. They are part of family life. All well-planned events share the same core principals whatever their size or type. Children's events are no different. Events designed with children in mind require no less time or effort. The audience may well be young but don't be fooled into thinking that they are any less demanding! Your event needs to work on many levels to please this audience and their parents and or guardians. While the process of planning a Children's events is the same as that aimed at adults, they are more difficult to deliver because of the requirements of the legislation designed to safeguard and protect children, while at events. The legislation and best practice guidance is all designed to ensure children attending events are kept safe, free from harm and if they, for example, get lost, there is a procedure in place to reunite parents and children. This chapter is specifically about events where children are the primary audience, either specifically or because of the nature the event programme children often attend with their parents. It will give you an overview of the seven steps event managers take to ensure they deliver successful and safe children's events.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and illustrate a conceptual tool for the planning of rural sport events.

The proposed model is elaborated based on theoretical contributions from the tourism and event literature, and illustrated with an empirical case concerning a sport and cultural event arranged in the Chianti countryside in Italy.

The results suggest that a form of professionalization of the event design process, understood as the search of high-quality experience for the local population and the tourists, is feasible within the socialization style of model typical of small events.

This study is based on selected theoretical contributions, and on a limited empirical investigation. Further research is needed in order to better understand the event design process, and in particular the processes of communication and involvement among the different community members.

The practical implications are related to the possible use of the developed model.

The theoretical contribution of this study is relative to the use of the concept of tourism experience, and more specifically of the embodied tourism experience, within the context of event design.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether watching a live track cycling event could increase youths' intention to participate in the sport, and to identify cognitive and affective mechanisms associated with post-event intentions.

A sample of youth spectators (n = 362) who experienced the 2016 Milton International Track Cycling Challenge completed pre- and post-event questionnaires to assess intention to participate and cognitive and affective components of their spectator experience.

Respondents' intentions to participate post-event were significantly higher than pre-event. Results also indicated that state inspiration mediated relationships between three cognitive dimensions of sport spectator experiences (i.e. fantasy, flow, evaluation) and intention to participate.

Sport managers should design youth day events to engage with youth prior to the event to increase their knowledge of the sport. This prior engagement may help youth to evaluate performances effectively. Moreover, event experience should be designed to incorporate vicarious and immersive experiences tailored to youth spectators.

The present study is one of the first to assess intentions to participate among youth spectators at multiple time points (i.e. before and after an event) and identifies specific mechanism within the spectator experience that may lead to a demonstration effect.

In our last paper we gave consideration to some concepts of reality within the context of management learning events. Drawing upon the extant body of theory and our own observations from practice we developed working models which enable a greater understanding of reality as a dimension which has important implications for the design of management learning events and for the type of learning which ensues.

In the emerging transformation economy, there is a shift from staging memorable experiences for many to eliciting life-transformative events for one. This study aims to understand how transformative experiences can be guided and what prerequisites are needed to elicit human transformation when designing experiences. This study borrows positive psychology as a theoretical lens to explore festivals as a prime context for liminal transformative experiences in the hospitality context.

A constructivist qualitative research design was used through 31 in-depth interviews. To ensure experience recollection, memory formation and integration of the experience into long-term transformative effects, all interviewees had attended an electronic dance music festival in the past 12 months.

Guided by the positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishments (PERMA) model, the thematic analysis revealed a series of psychological and contextual dimensions around PERMA and liminality that need to occur for transformative experiences, personal growth and self-transcendence to happen.

This study provides a guideline for event organisers and experiences designers to intentionally design and occasion positive human experiences in temporal and spatial liminal hospitality consumption contexts. Psychological and contextual dimensions are identified as critical factors in facilitating human transformation.

This paper bridges the emerging transformation economy, experience design and positive psychology. Grounded in PERMA, the study offers a novel theoretical model that serves as a framework for both transformative experience research and practical experience design.

This paper aims to examine how various academic disciplines shape the field of event portfolio management. Given the complex nature of portfolios comprising different genres that are studied separately from their respective disciplinary realms, the academic event portfolio landscape remains fragmented. This is against the nature of portfolios, which requires inter-disciplinarity and novel integration of genres, stakeholders and perspectives.

Based on a scoping literature review, this conceptual paper sets up a common ground for the academic study and industrial development of event portfolio management.

A comprehensive view of event portfolio literature across disciplines reveals its hypostasis as a compound transdisciplinary field. The authors suggest a set of foundational premises whereby they identify 22 principal thematic areas that comprise this emerging field.

The establishment of event portfolio management as a distinct field will help in the osmosis and diffusion of new ideas, models and best practices to run and leverage portfolios. The portfolio perspective highlights the need for cohesive learning to design comprehensive systems of events, implement joint strategies, solidify social networks, coordinate multiple stakeholders and develop methods of holistic evaluation.

By examining comprehensively event portfolio management as a transdisciplinary field, the authors have been able to identify principal research directions and priorities. This comprehensive analysis provides a synergistic ground, which at this embryonic stage of development, can be used to set out joint trajectories and reciprocal foci across the whole span of scholarship studying planned series of events.

Although the core phenomenon of events is the experiences and the meanings attached to them, there is limited management research on the experiential, existential and ontological dimensions of events. Phenomenology provides a sound philosophical framework for studying the multifaceted dimensions of experiences and associated meanings of events. However, quite surprisingly, phenomenology has not yet been systematically applied on the event management field. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to introduce phenomenology to the study of events, demonstrate its value for the field and encourage as well as guide its application on event management research.

A review and synthesis of the main phenomenological streams of thought was undertaken in order to develop a research paradigm for the application of phenomenology on the event management field.

The paper explains why phenomenology is needed in the study of events and their management, its conceptual underpinnings and streams of thought and finally suggests a research framework for conducting phenomenological studies in event management.

The consequences of the phenomenological perspective are delineated for explaining how the study of event meanings and experiences can be undertaken from this perspective. The limitations of phenomenology are noted such as the emphasis on “lifeworld” subjectivity and subsequent difficulty to claim the generalizability of research findings.

The suggested research framework can guide future event management research on how to apply phenomenology to the study of event experiences and meanings. On this basis, practitioners can get insight regarding how to develop and design events that optimize the perceived experiences of attendees.

While the experiential paradigm and the phenomenological turn have been spread across many disciplines emphasizing the essence of lived experiences in a variety of human interactions and exchanges, the event management field lags behind. This is unfortunate and has to be addressed as the experiences and meanings shape the essence of events. Therefore, this conceptual paper hopes to inspire, encourage and guide event management researchers to embrace and apply the phenomenological perspective on their future research endeavors, which can profitably complement and expand the predominant research paradigms in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the theory concerning visitor motivations, consumer experience and behavioural intentions at rural events; more specifically, it focusses on agricultural shows, which have hitherto been neglected in the events management literature. These events have successfully broadened their visitor base, but not without the attendant challenges for agricultural events’ designers.

The research adopts a quantitative design using a questionnaire survey. The analysis, using a range of statistical procedures, centres on consumer motivation, experience and behaviour in relation to show features and their influence on future behaviour.

The findings of this paper demonstrates the relative importance to the consumer of the show’s various components and their influence on revisitation, which reflect the significance of social, cultural and personal meanings attached to their experiences. This highlights key motivational variables such as appreciating the shows’ traditions and intellectual enrichment.

The study takes a cross-sectional approach, using a non-probability sample at four multi-day royal shows. Future research should establish the external validity of the findings and their applicability to smaller one-day agricultural shows.

The research provides a managerial contribution by informing show designers about the motivations of an increasingly diverse range of visitors. This will facilitate decisions around the engagement of contemporary design while preserving the traditional elements of agricultural shows.

Few studies have looked at rural events and, in particular, agricultural shows. Moreover, previous research in this area has focussed on rural tourism and place making, while consumer behaviour and experience at rural events has been neglected. This paper provides an insight into the consumer experience and perceived importance of various aspects of contemporary agricultural shows.

The need for management training, development and educational activities to be grounded in practical experience and real life situations has become a loud and frequently heard cry in current debate on how to improve the efficacy of such activities. Not the least vociferous in this rallying call have been, for example, proponents of what have come to be known as ‘Action Learning Programmes’. What is being echoed are comments, by the participants in managerial learning events, of the kind ‘… that sounds fine, but the reality is …’, ‘…in reality things just aren't like that…’,‘… playing with Lego bricks is fun … but what's it got to do with my job?…’,‘… but when I get back to the real world … ’, etc. Such statements reveal a feeling that, in entering a learning event, reality has somehow been left behind.