fostering a better place in which to live, work and invest),
and to animate specific attractions or areas.
There is no real justification for considering event
tourism as a separate field of studies. The constraint is
that both tourism and event studies are necessary to
understand this kind of experience. As well, there are subareas
like sport and cultural tourism (in which intrinsic
motivations prevail) and business travel (mostly extrinsically
motivated) that also focus on the event tourism
experience. In a similar vein, Deery, Jago, and Fredline
(2004) asked if sport tourism and event tourism are the
same thing. Their conceptualization showed sport tourism
as being at the nexus of event tourism and sport, with both
sport tourism and event tourism being sub-sets of tourism
in general. Indeed, there is almost limitless potential for
sub-dividing tourism studies and management in this
manner.
Fig. 2 depicts the set of interrelationships occurring at
the nexus of tourism and event studies, consisting of both
the marketing of events to tourists and the development
and marketing of events for tourism and economic
development purposes.
Event tourism is not usually recognized as a separate
professional field. Mostly it is seen as an application
of, or specialty within national tourism offices (NTOs)
and destination marketing/management organizations
(DMOs). Event development agencies (as opposed to
agencies focused on protocol, arts and culture which also
deal with planned events) embody event tourism completely,
and there are a growing number of associated career
paths or technical jobs, as illustrated in Fig. 3. And there is
a growing body of research and practical literature devoted
to most of these functions—as revealed in the ensuing
literature review.