Experiences of Event Visitors in Time and Space: GPS Tracking at Dutch Design Week

Visitor experiences are crucial for the success and sustainability of an event. It is necessary to understand spatial processes during events in order to have more insights on their developments and potentials. The visitors’ perceived event experiences depend not only on visitors’ personal background but also on temporal and locational aspects of the visit. This paper aims to add to the understanding of event experiences in time and space by using GPS data with additional surveys collected at Dutch Design Week in October, 2017. This study estimates the influence of personal, temporal and locational aspects on the type of experiences by conducting a binary logit model. It is found that in general visitors tend to have more positive feelings than negative during their visits. This is expected because people go to events in order to have different and worthy experiences. The duration of the visit, familiarity with the event and the event location is found to be influential on the visitors’ feelings. In addition, if people visit the attractive places, they tend to have more positive feelings. These results can be useful for event organizers and local governments. The paper concludes with reflections on the results and future research