Managing Minor Events for a Sustainable Tourism Development of an Urban Destination

Abstract

In recent years, a specific literature has been focused on the link between events and sustainability, aimed on the one hand at identifying the conditions for events to be sustainable, and on the other hand at pointing out how events themselves can become important tools for promoting a sustainable tourism. However, much of this literature focuses mainly on large events or events of a certain duration while literature on minor events is still quite limited. By means of a set of analyses focused on both leisure and business events of Milan (second largest Italian city), this paper wants to reflect on the potential role played by minor events in supporting a sustainable tourism development of an urban destination. The empirical evidences suggest that minor events could positively contribute to a sustainable tourism development of an urban destination. Moreover, in some specific cases small is better than big, meaning that minor events could be even more relevant than big ones in reducing seasonality (occupancy) and increase prices (ADR) in the hosting destination. In addition, as interesting side results, the study of the typical features of both minor business and leisure events confirm that even other non-economic dimensions are worthy of future investigation.