Socio-Economic Impacts of Event Failure: The Case of a Cancelled International Cycling Race

Marko Perić,Vanja Vitezić

doi:10.3390/su11185028

Abstract

The organization of large-scale sporting events implies different benefits and costs for hosting communities. However, little effort has been devoted to studying the impacts of event failures or postponed or cancelled events from the perspective of local residents. This paper is therefore concerned with the range of local residents’ perceived impacts resulting from the cancellation of the 2019 edition of the international men’s cycling race Tour of Croatia. In addition, it also examines if any significant differences exist between local residents familiar with the race and cancelling and local residents not familiar with the race, regarding the perceived impacts of this cancelled event on the hosting community. The number of perceived impacts was reduced by Exploratory Factor Analysis. Differences between local residents familiar with and those not familiar with the race and its cancelation were examined using the two-independent-samples Mann-Whitney U test. The results suggest that local residents not familiar with the event and its cancelation, when compared with local residents familiar with the event and its cancellation, perceive the majority of negative impacts as being weaker and most of the positive impacts as being stronger.

Highlights

The organization of events and festivals is confirmed as a method of promoting destinations, attracting tourists, and addressing seasonality in destinations [1,2]
Factor analysis resulted in 30 items under eight factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 (Table 4): factor 1 (Fac.1)—Community deconsolidation, factor 2 (Fac.2)—Environmental improvements, factor 3 (Fac.3)—Knowledge and entertainment diminution, factor 4 (Fac.4)—Community visibility and image deterioration, factor 5 (Fac.5)—Decline in terrorist threats, factor 6 (Fac.6)—Traffic relief, factor 7 (Fac.7)—Economic problems, and factor 8 (Fac.8)—Decline in socio-cultural exchange
The first test compared the perceived positive and negative impacts of the cancelled 2019ToC between local residents who have never heard of the Tour of Croatia event and those who have heard of the event

Summary

Introduction

The organization of events and festivals is confirmed as a method of promoting destinations, attracting tourists, and addressing seasonality in destinations [1,2]. The management issues relating to different events and festivals are often surprisingly similar [3] and usually focus on the impacts they generate for hosting communities. While these large gatherings can give impetus to local economies, they can cause some costs to people living in the area. As argued by Getz [4], any direct involvement in organized sport is capable of generating planned events. The costs and benefits sporting events generate for host communities is at the core of sport and event studies, and recent studies have mostly examined the impacts of sporting events from the perspective of local residents. Most of the literature follows the triple bottom line approach [8,9] and distinguishes between the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental impacts of sporting events (e.g., [10,11,12,13,14,15]), as asserted by Dawson and Jöns [16], negative legacies are sometimes neglected when planning and evaluating an event

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion