PurposeMusic festivals offer new opportunities for leisure and tourist experiences in Portugal. Some tourists and residents, the so-called festival goers, participate and come back to these events, whereas others, the non-goers, never participate and are not willing to do so. The aim of this research is to understand the decision to participate or not based on facilitators and constraints to participate or not in a music festival, dismantling residents and tourists' attitudes.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 1,178 music festival goers and non-goers in Portugal. Content analysis was undertaken to depict the most important determinants of their decisions. Those determinants were categorized according to the three dimensions of factors of ecological systems theory, considering festival goers and non-goers as well as tourists and residents.FindingsThe results suggested that although constraints are not as often voiced as facilitators, both influence decisions that are expressed as delaying, postponing, avoiding or complying with others by participating in these events. Furthermore, the results suggested that the decision to participate or not depends on the social contexts of the festival goers or non-goers, and that these social contexts may invert their decision, be it by facilitating or constraining their participation.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is limited to festivals in Portugal and used a qualitative analysis that may be confirmed in other countries with quantitative methods. Nevertheless, this research opens paths to discuss facilitators and constraints through ecological system theory and gives insights into this industry.Practical implicationsThe results provide important insights for festival organizers to retain and build long-term relationships with festival goers. The results also provide insights into how to overcome the resistance which non-goers demonstrated.Social implicationsThis research offers an in-depth and insightful understanding of individuals' attitudes towards music festivals, allowing festival demand to be better understood. Furthermore, this research proves that attendance of music festivals is mostly a socially driven behaviour.Originality/valueBy eliciting facilitators and constraints of the decision to participate in music festivals, considering residents and tourists, festival goers and non-goers, this study provides a deeper understanding of the decision to participate, through a theoretical framework which is rarely applied in this field.

Music festivals offer new opportunities for leisure and tourist experiences. The aim of this study is to analyse whether the motivation to persist with music festivals will remain or whether the concept of the music festival should be reinvented. Through a mixed-method approach, this study depicts motivations, perceptions, and behavioural intentions of attending traditional or online festivals with a structural equation model. Content analysis helps to further examine the attitudes of festival goers in the new contexts. They feel safe in traditional festivals if screening units and limited access is implemented, but if social pleasure is to be kept, music festivals should turn to online formats that allow interaction among participants. As such it can be concluded that in this new context, traditional music festivals are still a possibility if safety is ensured; nevertheless, online festivals seem to be the most obvious solution at least while the pandemic situation endures.

Urban tourism has particularities that distinguish it from other forms of tourism. The urban tourist wants to enjoy the city, its monuments, its environment, its cuisine, its events. The tourist will always be an outsider to the city, someone who will enjoy an area that is not designed specifically for tourism. But the tourist does not have to be a stranger in the city. The pandemic affected urban tourism in a more “violent” way. However, the pandemic has not affected the pull factors of cities – the cuisine, the monuments, the events, the vibe are still there waiting to be enjoyed. They will be, and city tourism will return with full vigor. This chapter argues that the quest for sustainability and change supported by a disruptive set of new technologies and the consequent skill shifts will possibly affect urban tourism intensely. These new trends have the potential to give rise to different solutions than those that have been attempted in the past. We will see if we can better reconcile cities with their tourists to the benefit of all.