Samenvatting

Large numbers of sport events are hosted every year, also in the Netherlands. These events all have some sort of impact on their host region, whether it is negative or positive. Multiple evaluation techniques such as the calculation of the economic impact are developed to determine this impact. However, a lot remains unknown about the precise impact of these events. What is known, is that great variety exists between the impact of all different kind of events, as also stated by the Dutch Sport Council in their report. One of their recommendations is to conduct event transcending research to obtain more knowledge about this topic.
This thesis tries to determine the most important factors which are related with the consumption of a visitor of a sport event. In order to do so, 25 datasets of the WESP used to calculate the economic impact of a sport event were combined into one large database. The database consists out of data of 25 Dutch sport events adding op to about 18000 respondents. The main goal was to try and explain what variables influence the consumption of the visitors. With this, event organizers might have a tool which helps them to maximize the impact of the sport event.
Furthermore, research within the field of sport events is not yet focussed on using a large amount of data. Assumptions are made, but no definite proof is provided. This thesis gives some insights into this way of doing research and provides proof for some assumptions one might have regarding the consumption of an event visitor.
The main question of this thesis is: Which factors influence the average consumption of the visitors of a sport event? To be able to answer this question, the available data was split up into five parts: personal and demographic features, transport, visitor characteristics, type of event and consumption patterns. Furthermore, experts were interviews to obtain more knowledge on the topic and to put the results into perspective. The data was analysed using Excel and SPSS and from this, it can be concluded that the following variables have a significant effect on the consumption of the visitors.
- Gender
- Age
- Nationality
- Grade
- Being a spectator or participant
- Staying longer
- Staying the night
- Being in the city because of the event
- Type of company
- Whether the event of free or not
- Whether the event is focussed on spectators or participants
- Whether the event lasts one day or multiple days
From this, it can also be concluded that a database is useful into determining and explaining certain event characteristics. However, the results were not considered to be special or unknown by the experts, as most of them already assumed these variables to influence the consumption. Nevertheless, this thesis provides the up to now non-existent proof for these assumptions and provides an overview of the scope of the effect these variables have on the average expenses.
Of course, one can have doubts about the generalisability of the results as not every type of event is equally represented within the database. Nevertheless, this thesis proves the usability of a large database in sports research and offers perspective into extending this way of doing research to explain other variables.

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Nominee for the The Hague University of Applied Sciences Thesis Award 2018 / Genomineerd voor de Haagse Hogeschool Afstudeerprijs 2018