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Almost every large event ends with the same document: the media monitoring report. It arrives a few weeks after the closing day as a thick file of clippings, screenshots and broadcast logs, with a reach figure on the first page, an advertising value next to it and a pie chart of positive, neutral and negative mentions. Everyone involved is pleased to receive it, and it very rarely answers the question the host destination actually cares about.
That question is about destination image, meaning the set of beliefs, feelings and expectations people hold about a place, whether or not they have been there. Events change it, sometimes more than years of advertising, but mostly not through reach. They change it by changing what people expect to find when they arrive, and that expectation is tested later, often by visitors who come in an ordinary month when no event is on. A clippings file counts how many people heard the city’s name. It cannot tell you what they now believe about the place, or whether the place can live up to it.
An image is a belief, a feeling and an intention at once
Researchers usually split destination image into three layers, and the split is more useful in practice than it first sounds. The cognitive layer is what people believe a place is like: safe or not, easy to reach or not, expensive, clean, crowded, interesting. The affective layer is how they feel about it: excited, calm, curious, slightly uneasy. The conative layer is what they intend to do: visit, return, recommend, avoid. A conceptual paper published through the University of Glasgow describes this cognitive, affective and conative model as firmly established for understanding why tourists revisit and recommend a place, and it argues that feelings carry much of the link between what people know and what they decide.
The affective layer is where event people feel at home, since producing emotion is the craft: the opening ceremony, the lights over the water, the crowd singing, the drone shot of the old harbour at dusk. That footage travels well, and it does create a feeling about a place. What it rarely touches is the cognitive layer, which is where most booking decisions get stuck. A family that loved the festival broadcast still has to believe that the airport transfer is simple, that the old quarter is walkable with a pushchair and that the hotels outside the event week are reasonably priced. If nothing in the event answered those quieter questions, the warm feeling fades without becoming a trip.
There is an older distinction in tourism research that still holds. Some of a place’s image is induced, produced deliberately by marketing, and much more of it is organic, formed by news, films, school lessons, friends’ stories and what people read without meaning to. Events sit in an awkward middle. They are planned and paid for, so they look induced, but most of what people take from them arrives in organic form: a news item, a colleague back from a congress, a sports commentator describing the streets. Their power comes from that organic form, and so does the host’s inability to control what they say.
What does an event actually tell people about a place?
Far more than the program. An event is a few days during which a destination shows, in public and under pressure, how well its destination management works.
Think about what a delegate or a fan actually reports when they come home. Rarely the keynote or the score in any detail. They talk about how long the queue at the airport was, whether the shuttle came, how the temporary staff at the gates treated them, whether the streets felt safe at night, what the food cost near the venue and how residents reacted to thousands of strangers. All of that is cognitive image, and it is formed by operations, not by communication. The visitor experience during the event becomes the evidence people use to judge the whole destination.
This is why I think the image effect of an event is decided mostly in the logistics meetings, not the marketing ones. A broadcast of a marathon shows the route, which means it shows the condition of the pavements, the facades and the waterfront along it. A congress shows the venue, the hotel cluster around it and the distance between them. A mega event shows the transport system, the security approach and the temperament of the city on its busiest day. The media plan mentions none of it, and all of it reaches the audience.
The same logic works in reverse, and it is uncomfortable. An event that goes badly creates an image far more efficiently than one that goes well. Crowding at the gates, a cancelled final day, a heat problem nobody planned for or a dispute with residents can become the single fact many people know about a place for years. The word of mouth after a disappointing event is longer, more detailed and more widely shared than after a good one. Hosts who treat an event mainly as a promotion exercise tend to underestimate this, because the promotional mindset assumes that more exposure is always better.
The fit between event and place matters, but not as most briefs assume
Agencies and destination marketers usually look for an event that fits the place: a sailing regatta for a coastal city, a heritage festival for an old capital, a technology summit for a city that wants to be seen as modern. The logic is that a good match strengthens the image transfer, so that the event’s qualities rub off on the destination.
There is research behind the idea that this transfer happens. A doctoral study at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, built around a world expo, found that the event’s image directly and positively affected the destination’s image, and that this in turn shaped tourists’ attitudes and intentions. The interesting part came next. When the study compared visitors who saw a high fit between event and destination with those who saw a moderate one, the effects on attitude and intention were stronger in the moderate group.
It is one study, in one city, around one very large event, so I would not build a rule on it. But it matches something I have seen often enough to take seriously. An event that fits a place perfectly mostly confirms what people already believed. The coastal city with a regatta remains the coastal city. An event that fits only partly, and surprises people a little, gives them a new belief to add: this city also does serious design, or music, or science. That additional belief is what changes behaviour.
Where I would criticize our own habits is in how safely events are usually chosen. Briefs ask for an event that matches the existing city brand, because nobody gets blamed for confirming what everyone agrees on. The result is a calendar that keeps repeating the destination’s old image back to it. A place that wants to be seen differently needs at least some events that stretch the picture, and it needs the substance behind them, because an event that claims a new identity the place cannot support is just place branding with a stage attached.
Who has to live up to the picture the event created?
The people who are there after the event leaves.
Consider who meets the expectation an event creates. A visitor who saw the festival footage and books a long weekend in a quiet month arrives with that footage in mind. The streets are emptier, some places are closed, the lights over the water are gone, and the guesthouse owner, the taxi driver and the museum attendant have to deliver a destination that matches a picture they had little part in making. When the gap is large, the visitor feels misled, and the image that took one event to build takes much longer to repair.
For this reason I think destination image should be judged less by how attractive the event made the place look and more by how close the event’s picture is to the place on an ordinary day. An event that shows what a place genuinely is, its real neighbourhoods, its real food, its residents as participants rather than background, creates expectations the destination can meet in March as well as in the event week. One that builds a temporary world for the cameras creates expectations nobody can meet afterwards.
Residents are part of the image in another way too. Researchers sometimes speak of the image a place has in the eyes of its own people, and events affect that just as strongly. When residents feel that an event was done to their city rather than with it, the social impact of events turns negative, and that mood shows in how they treat visitors in the months that follow. When they feel proud of it, they become the most convincing part of the destination’s image, because a visitor trusts a resident’s enthusiasm over a campaign every time. Residents’ attitudes toward tourism development often shift after big events, in either direction, and hosts would learn a lot by asking before and after.
There is also the risk of a place becoming known for one week. Some destinations are so strongly tied to a single festival or tournament that people cannot imagine visiting at any other time. It looks like success, and commercially it often is for those few days. But an image built on one date makes seasonality in tourism worse, not better, because it teaches people when to come and, by implication, when not to.
A media report that asks what people now believe
If the clippings file cannot measure image, what can? Nothing as convenient, I am afraid. Image lives in people’s heads, so the only real measure is asking them, and asking the right people at the right time.
The most useful approach I know is modest. Before the event, ask a sample of the people the destination actually wants to attract what they believe about the place, how they feel about it and whether they would consider visiting. Ask the same kind of people the same questions some months after the event, and compare. Add a few questions for the people who came: what did they expect before arriving, and what surprised them? Add a few more for residents. The whole exercise needs no large budget, and together it says far more about image change than any advertising value equivalent, which, to be frank, mostly measures how much space the event would have cost if someone had bought it.
The second source is the front line. Hotel front desks, guides and destination management companies hear every week what visitors expected and what they found. A short note from them twice a year, collected by whoever coordinates destination development in the place, is one of the cheapest image studies a city can run. Pair it with the occupancy pattern and other destination data from the months after an event, especially the quiet ones, and you begin to see whether the event changed what people believe or only what they saw for a weekend.
Measuring image this way does not make events less valuable. It makes them more accountable, and it shifts the planning question from how many people will see the event to what the destination wants them to believe afterwards, and whether the city can back that belief up on a wet weekday. Most event plans still answer the first question in detail and the second not at all. When your next event report lands on the desk, which page will tell you what people now expect from your city?