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A common belief about mega events is that they are mostly about stadiums and opening ceremonies. Build the venue, stage a spectacular first night, keep the cameras happy, and the rest will follow.
The venue and the ceremony matter, of course. But a mega event, an Olympics, a World Cup, a European Championship or an Expo that occupies a whole city for years, is lived mostly outside the venue, and the questions a host city should ask early are about rooms, squares, temporary teams and the ordinary weeks after the final. Visitors who come for a tournament or an expo spend only a small part of their time inside the stadium or the fairground, and none of them remembers the city by its fireworks alone. They remember the hotel that held their booking, the square where they watched the match they had no ticket for, the person at the metro exit who pointed them the right way and the restaurant that fed them at midnight. A city lives through a mega event in those places, and that is where the most useful preparation happens.
The bid book and the hotel reservation screen
What sets such an event apart from an ordinary big one is reach and time: it can involve a whole country, not only a city, years before it takes place. It draws visitors from many countries at once, keeps global media attention for weeks and comes with a long preparation that touches transport, accommodation, venues and public space.
The bid book and the hotel’s reservation screen describe the same event in two very different languages. The first talks about visibility, a global audience and city branding. The second asks which nights exactly, how many rooms, held by whom and on what terms. Both kinds of questions matter, but it is usually the second kind, asked by hotels, DMCs, organizers, caterers and transport companies, that decides how the city actually gets through the event and what it keeps afterwards.
For me this is not abstract either: Türkiye, where I work, will co-host the 2032 European Football Championship with Italy. Host cities usually learn their date the better part of a decade ahead. To a fan that sounds far away. To the people who will host those fans, it is close.
There is a helpful pattern in the host cities that are remembered well. The event did not invent their future; it sped up a plan they already had, a transport line that was needed anyway, a waterfront waiting to be opened, a hotel stock the tourism sector wanted to grow. The OECD’s recommendation on global events and local development asks hosts to tie an event to longer-term local goals from the very beginning, and the same thinking works at the scale of a single business. A hotel group, a convention bureau or a DMC can ask which of the things it already wanted to do this event will help it do sooner: a new meeting room, staff who speak more languages, a partnership with the district’s restaurants, a better transfer system. When the tournament gives existing plans a deadline, the business comes out stronger. When it pushes a business into investments it would never otherwise need, the summer may be busy and the following years much less so.
A fan zone in the main square
A match lasts ninety minutes, and the fan stays for days. Fans arrive early, want a screen and a crowd for the games they have no ticket for, walk, eat, shop, take a boat, visit a museum, look for a day trip and leave a day after their match. Those days of free time hold most of the experience and much of the spending, and they are filled not by the stadium but by the city’s own sector: hotels and hostels, DMCs and local tour operators, restaurants and shopkeepers, guides, transfer companies and event organizers.
The fan zone sits at the center of those days. It is often imagined as a big screen in a square with some chairs and a couple of food stands. A good fan zone is really a temporary venue that welcomes tens of thousands of people every day for weeks, with its own program, revenue model, security flows, suppliers and plan for bad weather. When it works, matches are only part of the day. There is music, a children’s program, regional food, sponsor activations, perhaps a piece of the city’s own food festival moved into the square. Food stands go not only to big chains; the city’s own street food makers, coffee houses and local product shops also get a place, and for many of them the tournament becomes one of their best seasons ever.
The encouraging part for most host cities is that the people who know how to do this already exist. Organizers who have run big concerts, city festivals and shopping mall activations understand entry flows, queues, noise limits, relations with the neighborhood and storm scenarios. A mega event takes that knowledge to a bigger scale; it does not require anyone to invent it. What it does demand is clarity at the edges. Britain’s safety regulator treats working with others for crowd safety as part of the event plan itself rather than an afterthought, and anyone who has run a big site knows why: the difficult moments sit where one organization’s area ends and another’s begins, at the gate between the fan zone and the street, at the metro exit, at the taxi rank. A restaurant two streets away needs the same clarity on a smaller scale, a rough forecast of when the crowds will come and a contact to call when a delivery cannot get through a closed road.
The days between matches are also where DMCs and local tour operators can really earn their keep. A fan with a free day in a host city wants something short, clear and bookable on the spot: a boat on the river or the bay, a few hours in the historic quarter, a food walk, perhaps a quick flight to the country’s most famous natural site for those with two free days. Programs like these are easy to prepare a season ahead and hard to improvise in the week itself, and the companies that package them early, with prices in several languages and pickup points near the fan zone, will be the ones fans find.
The room block and the front desk
For hotels, a mega event is an opportunity and a test of judgment at the same time. The terms are negotiated long before the first fan lands, and mistakes are expensive in both directions, so the ones I would want settled early are these:
- the exact nights in the block, counting the weeks of build-up and removal, when crews, broadcasters and suppliers need rooms too;
- who holds the block, and whether it is the organizer, an accommodation agency or a sponsor;
- minimum stays, and whether they fit fans who come for one match;
- the release date and what happens to rooms handed back late;
- room for the regular guests and groups who come that week every year;
- beds for the temporary workforce, who rarely appear in anyone’s first count.
There is a habit in our industry that I think does real damage to host cities: prices that jump so sharply during the event period that fans choose to sleep in another city, or that guests who come every year decide to go elsewhere for good. A hotel can win one excellent week and lose the customers of the following years. During big events many ordinary visitors stay away to avoid the crowds anyway, so the tournament partly replaces normal demand rather than simply adding to it, and pricing as if it were pure extra demand misreads the situation.
A host city’s reputation among visiting fans, and with it much of its destination image, is made at the front desk and the bus stop long before anyone reaches the stadium.
Language and information count as much as price. A receptionist who can help a fan in English, and ideally in the fan’s own language, find a pharmacy, a place to watch the next match or the right bus home is selling something more valuable than a bed. Hotels that start training for this a few seasons ahead, with congresses and international groups as practice, will feel the difference.
The steward at the metro exit
Every mega event depends on thousands of temporary workers: stewards, hostesses, drivers, guides, ushers, interpreters, kitchen staff. Large international organizations usually run a structured volunteer program, and in many markets they are among the few settings where that model genuinely works. But most of the people fans meet around the city will not be volunteers. They will be daily staff from agencies, students, seasonal workers and the employees of small businesses.
To a visitor none of that distinction matters. The person who answers a question at the station or the hotel is the city. Training, reasonable working hours, insurance and payment on time are therefore not small details; they set the tone of the whole event. They also decide whether these people stay in the industry afterwards, because a well prepared, well treated temporary team becomes the experienced workforce of the next congress, festival or tournament.
Host cities that do well usually practice first. In the years before a mega event, they host international matches, big concerts, congresses and festivals that test transport, crowd flows, hotel capacity and staff readiness on a smaller scale, and show where the queues form, which roads block and which signs confuse visitors. The sector can contribute directly here: organizers, associations and agencies planning events for the coming years can look seriously at the cities that will host the tournament, where every gathering is useful rehearsal for the city and a well prepared venue for the client.
The venues on an ordinary Tuesday after the final
A mega event is judged on television by its opening night, but a city keeps it through what its businesses, venues and people go on doing afterwards. The meeting room built with the tournament in mind can host congresses for decades. The square that held the fan zone can become the city’s summer events site. An urban park that hosted a public screening can keep the paths, lighting and power points it gained. The stadium can open its lounges and concourses to fairs, launches and school finals. The temporary team trained for the tournament can work the next festival, and the stage and sound companies that served the fan zone can bring the same standard to the city’s community events for years.
These things rarely happen by themselves, and almost all of them depend on decisions the sector can take years in advance, without waiting for anyone. Speaking as someone who has spent his career on the operational side of events, I would trust a host city’s preparation far more if I heard its hotel sales managers and DMC owners talking about the autumn after the final than if I only heard about the opening night.