Tourist Accommodation Effects of Festivals

Lately the interest in arranging festivals or special events has increased in many cities. In this paper we present an econometric model to account for the tourism accommodation impact of such events. The autoregressive count data model incorporates some of the more important factors in the planing and evaluation of an event, such as spare capacity, displacement effects and the costs that face the visitors. The results for two large Swedish festivals indicate that there are some displacement effects, but that the net tourism effect is positive only since the average visitor stays longer during festival periods.