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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Outdoor arts festivals have been proposed as a means of rehearsing democratic practices and of placemaking interventions in the space time of contemporary capitalism. I consider whether they are really able to repurpose civic and pseudo public space and challenge the production and reproduction of that space as a colonial and neoliberal territory, or are they merely examples of the ‘pseudo-fête’ prolonging such structures by other means?

This chapter uses case studies of two outdoor arts festivals in the United Kingdom, at which I have performed rhythmanalyses, to explore festivalised spaces and the extent to which they might empower people. Empowerment here relates not only to individual agency, autonomy and self-determination but also to the development of shared, social identity within crowds. The role of festival management, the arrangement of festival space/times and the codification of behaviour are of particular relevance to these effects. I use time-lapse videography to capture data around flows and accretions of audiences, combined with my embodied presence in the lived space of the festival, sensing its rhythms and atmospheres.

Using the concept of polyrhythmia to comprehend and unpick complex durational patterns, I focus on how public spaces are transformed when animated by performances and how public space can redefine both performance and audience dynamics. The adaptation and application of rhythmanalysis in this project has revealed patterns of behaviour and evidenced characteristic qualities of outdoor arts which were previously ignored or only assumed.

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.

The majority of scholarly contributions in tourism social media have focused on assisting practitioners to optimize online platforms or to describe the digital behavior of prospective individual tourists. These studies are dominated by mechanistic ontological frameworks, which take little notice of the inherently social nature of tourism consumption. Acknowledging the sociality of Web 2.0 communications, this chapter explores the potentials of an alternative analytical framework informed by symbolic convergence theory. The linkages between tourism social media, virtual communities, and symbolic convergence processes are illustrated by examples of postings taking place on the Facebook fan site of Roskilde festival. These examples highlight the significance of symbolic communities in shaping the visitor experience against the backdrop of contemporary consumer culture.

In recent years, festivals have become prominent events in many cities throughout Europe, playing a crucial role in improving the image of the host city and enhancing its attractiveness to tourists. Festivals are temporary organizations with a short-lived and intermittent nature. Such features could raise several challenges in terms of maintaining a festival’s identity and its attendees’ identification during the periods of inactivity. Drawing on the literature on temporary organizations, organizational identity, and social identification, this chapter investigates how festivals can communicate their central and stable characteristics to audiences by adopting Web 2.0-based communication strategies. To explore this issue, the chapter illustrates the case of an Italian festival, Fotografia Europea, which has changed its communication strategy from a more traditional approach to a Web 2.0-based one.