Skift Live Tourism Summit: Five Decisions in the Room

Presented by Live Nation North Javits Center, NYC · Sept 22, 2026 Skift Live Tourism Summit 2026 · Pre-Read Every destination has live events on its calendar. The open question is whether it builds anything lasting. Live tourism has become a primary demand driver in global travel, reshaping revenue, seasonality, and infrastructure planning.[4] A single event can generate a month’s worth of demand, which sounds great until it pushes a city to its limits, ruffles its residents, and the value gets passed through to someone else’s balance sheet. Meanwhile, many travel operators treat live events as one-offs and windfalls rather than working with destinations to build partnerships around a year-long calendar. Misalignment on these priorities means missed recurring revenue opportunities for all parties. Each session at Skift Live Tourism Summit is built around a consequential decision that top travel leaders are currently facing. Yet, similar tensions will lead to different decisions. A destination, a promoter, and an operator will answer questions in ways that may contradict each other. The purpose of the Summit environment is to surface this friction and challenge preconceived assumptions. “Where travelers once chose a destination and then filled it with activities, they now choose the moment — a concert, a festival, a sporting event — and build the trip around it.” Skift Research, Ticket to Tourism: Live Tourism as a Travel Motivator Skift Live Tourism Summit: North Javits Center, NYC, September 22 Attendance is reserved for senior executives shaping how live moments influence travel, destinations, and economic growth. Apply to attend The agenda The Five Decisions Decision 01Leverage or Invest: Play the Surge or the Long Game?→ Decision 02Cities or Promoters: Who Gets the Cut?→ Decision 03Readiness vs. Reality: How Prepared Are You to Handle Demand?→ Decision 04Yield vs. Access: How High Can You Price Without Diminishing Returns?→ Decision 05Competition vs. Coordination: How Can You Maximize Margins While Working Collaboratively?→ Leverage or Invest: Play the Surge or the Long Game? Every event stakeholder should be watching the delta between a debut and a recurring event. Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix generated about $1.5 billion in its debut year and $934 million the next, once the one-time build-out rolled off. [2] Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour pushed one Cincinnati hotel’s rate from about $72 a night to $1,024, a number that clearly doesn’t have staying power. [3] Travel companies face a nuanced decision about what role they want to play in events. Skift Research cites live tourism as a primary demand driver that shapes yield and seasonality [4], raising the stakes. An anomalous blockbuster tour or residency has quarterly revenue implications, and building around a destination that drives consistent demand for live tourism has long-term potential. The question is which makes sense in every destination a travel brand serves. 86% of travelers said live tourism is important to their overall sense of happiness and well-being. [1] The Decisions Being Made Right Now Do we build permanent capacity for demand that arrives in bursts, or look at each peak as a temporary supply? What turns a one-night attendee into a repeat visitor, and how can we measure the conversion? Which events belong on our calendar as recurring demand assets, and which are one-off marketing spend? What to Discuss in the Room How Live Nation’s Russell Wallach thinks a city can turn a single sold-out weekend into a recurring demand asset. What Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s Steve Hill learned while building an events calendar that fills rooms year-round. Cities or Promoters: Who Gets the Cut? Live events create revenue for airlines, hotels, restaurants, rideshare, and retail. The U.S. Travel Association estimated that $100 spent on a live performance generates roughly $300 more in local spending. [5] The economics of live tourism aren’t as clear for destinations. They absorb hosting costs and bear reputational and economic risk if a weekend goes wrong, while promoters, venues, and platforms each take a share of the upside. Travel suppliers are in the middle: They profit from a surge, but if an event gets canceled or rescheduled, their revenue model gets thrown out of whack. A city that hosts without negotiating for the value it generates is subsidizing everyone else and taking on undue risk. FIFA generates billions in revenue from the World Cup, while its 16 host cities absorb most of the cost and capture value only through the visitor surge around it. [7] The Decisions Being Made Right Now How do destinations capture value from visitor spend? Which partners should we negotiate terms with before an event, while we still have leverage? What data do we need to prove our share of the value we help create? What to Discuss in the Room What On Location’s Paul Caine says about where the premium sits when a live event is packaged into a travel product, and who should own the guest. How Klook’s Kenny Sham describes what a destination should bring to the table to share in the value a tour generates. Why Brand USA’s Leah Chandler says multi-million dollar licensing fees price national DMOs out of the World Cup and Olympics entirely, leaving host cities and rightsholders to capture the upside. Readiness vs. Reality: How Prepared Are You to Handle Demand? Skift Research now identifies live tourism as a factor in infrastructure planning. [4] Winning a competition to host an event is not the same as readiness, which requires resetting how entire municipalities, regions, and even countries plan operations and capital budgets. The history of global mega-events is littered with empty stadiums and crumbling structures built for a single purpose. Destination tourism leaders who plan with their elected officials, government staff, and travel operators will be able to absorb and satisfy demand. The ones that treat each event as a trophy or a bonus are likely to spend the following year(s) repairing their reputation instead of preparing for the next opportunity. When demand tests every system at once, everyone gets judged on service recovery, with potential long-term consequences. The Decisions Being Made Right Now What is our real capacity ceiling across lodging, transit, and labor, and where does it break first? Who owns service recovery if several systems fail during an event? How far ahead do we plan for a calendar now stacked with mega-events? What to Discuss in the Room How Visit Philadelphia’s Angela Val prepared for the World Cup and a 250th-anniversary celebration in the same year. How Morocco National Tourism Office’s Achraf Fayda is using the 2030 World Cup as a tool to fast-track infrastructure upgrades on a compressed timeline. Yield vs. Access: How High Can You Price Without Diminishing Returns? There’s no shame in maximizing yield management for a major live moment. But stakeholders have to face the reality of potentially pricing out residents from attending while they fight crowds, not to mention everything else that gets more expensive. A destination with a full event calendar may satisfy its industry partners but alienate its constituents. When the tour leaves town, a city and its residents still have to get along. Overtourism backlash is already an issue in the markets best positioned to host, and aggressive event pricing feeds it. For example, overseas fans drove a 26.8% jump in the UK’s international music tourists in 2025 [6], but those attendees plan ahead to absorb peak pricing and are least tied to the community. The revenue is attractive, but the reputational cost is often left off the spreadsheet. Some host cities for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour hit 97% occupancy on concert weekends, with demand for temporary workers spiking up to 1,000% near some stadiums. [3] The Decisions Being Made Right Now How high can we price the peak before we damage resident goodwill and repeat demand? Can (and should) we protect access for locals and budget-minded fans, and how do we fund it? Do dynamic pricing gains outlast reputational costs once an event ends? What to Discuss in the Room How Visit Philadelphia’s Angela Val weighs peak revenue with impact on the residents who absorb the crowds. What access and perception mean to Brand USA’s Leah Chandler at the national level. What Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s Steve Hill has found is the flip side of live tourism: Formula 1 fills about 80,000 of the city’s 150,000 rooms, but the surrounding weekend becomes the lowest-occupancy stretch of the year everywhere else in town. Competition vs. Coordination: How Can You Maximize Margins While Working Collaboratively? No single player owns a live tourist. The highest risk and highest rewards hinge on how destinations, airlines, accommodations, venues, promoters, and platforms coordinate. Every party wants the margin, and the value either grows or leaks at the seams between them. A city, a carrier, and a promoter can each optimize a single weekend in their silo, but still leave value on the table. Destinations that build a live tourism category together with other stakeholders will succeed if they’re not seen as a place where everyone has to fight over every dollar. 92% of executives agreed that live tourism will become more critical for their businesses in the next five years. Can they get along well enough with each other to capture it? [1] The Decisions Being Made Right Now Which partnerships need to be in place before the next event, and who convenes them? What are we willing to share, in data, revenue, or risk, to capture more of the whole trip? Where does going it alone cost us more than coordinating would? What to Discuss in the Room How Brand USA’s Leah Chandler approaches a national brand across an ecosystem whose members compete for the same traveler. What coordination looks like to On Location’s Paul Caine when rights holders, venues, and travel operators each own one piece of the guest. Why C3 Presents’ Charlie Walker thinks the travel industry can do more to leverage live events. What You Will Leave With Are you programming events or building an economy? You came in knowing that live events move people. Leave knowing which decision to make first. Most destinations still fund live events out of a marketing budget, one year at a time. A handful treat their calendar as infrastructure, worth long-term investment, competition, and measurement. Many don’t yet know which group they belong to. Hear how Live Nation can turn a tour into durable demand, how a host city plans for the surge, and how the value gets split among the travel companies that support it. Discussing them with your peers in real time shows you where your organization stands and what the next move needs to be. Apply to attend Sources [1]Skift and Qiddiya City, “The Power of Play and Its Impact on Global Tourism”: https://skift.com/insights/new-report-the-power-of-play-and-its-impact-on-global-tourism/ [2]Wisconsin Business Review, “The Economic Impact of the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix”: wisconsinbusinessreview.org/the-economic-impact-of-the-formula-1-las-vegas-grand-prix/ [3]Camoin Associates, “Did Taylor Swift Come to Your City? Understanding the Economic Impact of the Eras Tour”: camoinassociates.com/resources/understanding-the-economic-impact-of-the-eras-tour/ [4]Skift Research, “Ticket to Tourism: Live Tourism As a Travel Motivator”: research.skift.com/reports/ticket-to-tourism-live-tourism-as-a-travel-motivator/ [5]U.S. Travel Association, “The Taylor Swift Impact”: ustravel.org/news/taylor-swift-impact-5-months-and-5-billion [6]UK Music, “Oasis, Beyoncé and Dua Lipa Help Attract Massive 26.8% Increase in Overseas Visitors”: ukmusic.org/news/oasis-beyonce-and-dua-lipa-help-attract-massive-26-8-increase-in-overseas-visitors… [7]NC State, “The Economics of the FIFA World Cup: Who Really Profits?”: https://cnr.ncsu.edu/news/2026/06/fifa-world-cup-economic-impact/ Presenting sponsor