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According to the ETOA, “there is no strong link” between hosting any sporting event and growth in tourism. “The audiences regularly cited for such events as the Olympics are exaggerated [and] attendees at the Games displace normal visitors and scare tourists away. Both Sydney and Barcelona had ‘excellent’ Olympic Games, but their tourism industries have not significantly benefited.”
The assumption that billions of people will watch the Olympics on TV and then beat a path to the host city is wrong on both counts, the ETOA argues. “Sports fans watch television in order to enjoy the sport. . . . This activity is notoriously narrowly focused.” As for the global TV audience, the 3.9 billion viewers widely touted for the 2004 Olympics in Athens would mean that 80 percent of the world population with access to electricity was in front of the tube. What isn’t generally understood, the ETOA claims, is that 3.9 billion was the potential, not the actual audience.
The ETOA also notes that people who travel for sporting events are “unlike regular tourists, and more like business travelers.” They “tend not to spend money on [other forms of] leisure and entertainment, and when not in stadia they watch events on TV rather than engaging in other activities.” The greater Los Angeles area recorded a slip in theme park revenue in 1984; in 1992, resort business on Spain’s Costa Brava languished. And though hotel construction is fueled by the buildup to the Olympics, hotel occupancy rates drop off a cliff once the two-week event is over. Hotel occupancy in Barcelona, for example, was 70 percent the year before the 1992 Games, but fell to 54 percent for two years afterward.
A fascinating read on this subject is the Olympic Report by the European Tour Operators Association (2006, updated in 2008), which came to the conclusion that “there appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage.”

Tags: olympics, Tourism

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.