Helping Festivals Thrive Through Generational Changes

Abstract

Festivals are a key component of destination tourism. They provide social and economic benefits to communities. Yet, COVID-19 has decimated the tourism industry including festivals. Given the nature of festivals and the inability to follow COVID protocols in a festival environment, festivals were particularly hard hit, and face an uncertain future. As a matter of practice, festivals need to attract and generate a loyal following among new generations to have a long-term sustainable future. However, given the uncertainty created by COVID, will these generations be loyal to a festival, and what drives loyalty of festival visitors? To attempt to answer these questions, this study applied an extended version of Rusbult’s (1980) Investment Model to festival visitors to assess loyalty and to better understand differences between young and old sub-cohorts of Millennial and GenX generations.

An online panel survey was conducted. The sample (n=404) included Millennials and GenX festival goers who had attended the same festival at least twice in the past ten years. Using an extended Investment Model that included festival quality attributes as antecedents of satisfaction, the study assessed loyalty scores among the four sub-cohorts. While the model did not adequately fit the data, the revised model did account for over 74 percent of the variance in festival loyalty. Satisfaction and investment size were found to significantly predict festival loyalty. Further, activities and entertainment, and information services were found to significantly and positively influence satisfaction.

MANOVA and ANOVA analyses were conducted to examine differences between the generational cohorts. Significant differences were found between young Millennials and both older and young GenX on several factors, with young Millennials consistently scoring higher. While this suggests there are generational differences, more research is needed to further refine the results and better understand these differences. It is believed results of this study provide valuable direction for future research on both festival loyalty and satisfaction as well as generational differences in festival loyalty and satisfaction.