Search results

One of the most significant innovations to emerge from Sydney's hosting of the 2000 Olympic Games has been the way that Australian tourism organisations have built the Games into their marketing strategies. As the Business Manager Olympic Games for the Australian Tourist Commission, Maggie White is responsible for the ambitious international Olympic tourism marketing program. Here she talks to Dr Laurence Chalip of Griffith University, about her role and the challenges she faced.

Mega sport events (MSE) are immensely popular but also highly criticized because these include large public budgets and involve politically sensitive topics. In this context, there is an increasing attention toward legacy planning, the effort to confer long‐term benefits to a host destination through organizing MSEs, such as the Olympic Games. When it comes to event planning, large‐scale master plans are a common approach. However, in the Netherlands the authors see that an alternative development model is pursued called the Dutch Approach to prepare for the possible candidature to host the Olympic Games of 2028. This paper aims to analyze this approach with a specific focus on whether this approach has the potential to result in a positive legacy.

The research involves a literature review which distinguishes factors that positively or negatively influence event legacies. This results in a framework which is used as a guide for a content analysis of data on the Dutch Approach. Hence, data are obtained from analyzing academic and professional literature, policy documents, research reports, and newspaper articles on the Dutch Olympic ambitions, and the planning approach thereof. Moreover, data are derived from a study by the authors on the development of the area “Sportas Amsterdam”.

The research identifies factors that can contribute positively and negatively to the legacy of events. It provides a unique insight into the planning process of The Netherlands in the context preparing a bid for the Olympic Games of 2028. What can be learned from the Dutch Approach is that planning for a positive legacy is a long‐term and complex process that heavily relies on the support of a range of stakeholders. Due to the range of actors involved, it involves much negotiations and becomes increasingly difficult to achieve consensus.

The paper provides a reflection on the concepts of legacy and legacy planning, and outlines a set of propositions concerning the future of MSEs that present an agenda for further research. By doing to, the paper highlights the importance of focusing on how the relations between stakeholder involvement, planning approaches, and types of urban regimes influence the extent to which a positive legacy can be achieved.

The paper provides a state of the art overview of contributions on event legacy and legacy planning. It draws attention to conditions for positive legacies and implications for planning and governance approaches. It is argued that a top‐down government‐led approach to a MSE will probably have less impact on future tourism compares to the Dutch Approach.

The conference was dedicated to global changes in tourism and to their specific impact in the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) region. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the discussions at the conference.

Summary and highlights of the conference papers.

This report summarizes the findings and recommendations discussed at the international “Tourism in Tomorrow's World” conference that took place in Doha, February 2014. The conference depicted global trends and developments to zoom in on specific opportunities for tourism development in the GCC area. In view of major events planned in the host country, event legacies were included as a special topic. Conference sessions were dedicated to investments in tourist attractions and hotels, the relation between education and industry and to cultural heritage and tourism. As a result of the conference strong opportunities for tourism development in Qatar and other GCC members were identified.

This has been the first international conference on long‐term tourism strategies in the GCC area. The underlying motivation was the growing awareness in the GCC area of the need for economic diversification and reduction of oil dependence. The conference coincided with the launch of the Qatar National Tourism Sector Strategy 2030.

While the Olympic Games are always under the spotlight, the Paralympic Games are somehow ignored. This paper aims to invite the general public to think about the para-athletes and the differential treatments they received.

Among the participating countries, many of them were unable to win a single Olympic or Paralympic medal. When the dependent variable is left-censored, ordinary least squares regression is asymptotically biased downwards. In the literature, researchers typically employ the maximum likelihood Tobit model to take care of the censoring problem. However, some researchers argue that the Hurdle model has an advantage over the Tobit model in identifying the determinants of winning Olympic medals. Following their wisdom, this paper employs both the Tobit and Hurdle models in analysis.

The empirical evidence gathered in this paper suggests that population size, host status and average years of schooling are the big three socio-economic determinants when it comes to winning medals at the Paralympic Games and Olympic Games. The findings support the hypothesis that sports talent is randomly distributed and a large country has a higher chance to have talented athletes or para-athletes winning the Olympic medals. The strong host advantage also showed up in the following Paralympics but was not so strong at the next Olympics.

This paper not only examines the relationship between various social, economic and political factors in determining the success of a nation in the Paralympic Games but also attempts to identify possible non-traditional determinants.