The tourism side of events: case Study North Festival

Abstract

In different formats and for various reasons events have always made part of our life. The many factors involved in the creation of an event led to the existence of a huge variety of event categories, making it a complex phenomenon that has been getting more and more importance in the tourism industry. Its rapid growth as an important tourism product was not followed by an intense investigation on this topic. Therefore the connection between events and tourism in not completely clear, causing some difficulties when it comes to classify if an event is a tourism product. Based on an extensive analysis of the existing investigation, this study has the goal to contribute to this discussion by trying to establish the existing relation between tourism and the event industry, while trying to define a set of quantitative and qualitative metrics that allow to measure an event tourism dimension. In order to show the applicability of these metrics they were tested trough the analyses of the North Festival, which also had the goal to conclude if the festival was in fact a tourism event.