The economic impact of a scientific event on an island tourism destination

ABSTRACT

Event tourism is a dynamic element in many destinations. Current literature on its economic impact has focused mainly on the MICE segment, and sports and cultural events, with few papers on scientific and/or academic events. The aim of this paper is to analyse the economic impact of the 30th School of Public Health of Menorca in 2019. Four information sources were used and the sample in the fieldwork consists of 441 personal interviews collected using a structured questionnaire. Findings show that the average daily expenditure per person of non-resident participants in Menorca is 160.66 euro—much higher than the daily expenditure for an average tourist, or those travelling to Menorca for any other reason and that it increases with age. Given the average participant stay, the direct economic impact amounted to approximately 609,911.14 euro. With a tourism multiplier of 1.38, the direct and indirect impact of non-resident participants amounts to 826,759.57 euros.

KEYWORDS:

• Event tourism
• scientific event
• economic impact
• daily expenditure
• tourism multiplier

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by School of Public Health of Menorca and Universitat de les Illes Balears.