E.3 Tourism and sport at the international scale

Niche tourism as a national strategy

Most international trips are mass tourism: large numbers of visitors buying standardised products, such as package holidays to coastal resorts, in a small number of popular destinations. Niche tourism is the opposite approach. It offers a specialised product, built around a particular interest or activity, to a smaller market segment of visitors who usually stay longer and spend more per day.

A niche product can have a global sphere of influence: it draws visitors from all over the world to one country because the experience is available in few other places. Visitors travel from Europe, North America and Asia to trek in the Himalayas, to see the Hobbit holes of New Zealand or to walk through the Nabataean tombs of Hegra in Saudi Arabia. The idea of a sphere of influence, the area from which a facility draws its users, applies to a whole country as well as to a park or a stadium.

The three niches named most often are adventure, movie location and heritage tourism, each built on a different kind of primary resource. Dark tourism is a sub-type of heritage tourism, and smaller niches such as medical and space tourism serve narrower markets still.

Why countries develop niche strategies

• Differentiation: a country that cannot compete with Spain or Thailand on beach holidays can compete with a product nobody else offers.

• Higher value per visitor: niche tourists often spend more per day and use local guides, lodges and restaurants, so more of their spending stays in the country.

• Using a unique primary resource: mountains, wildlife, ancient sites or a famous film location are primary touristic resources that already exist and need only secondary resources around them.

• Spreading the benefits: niche products are often in peripheral regions, away from the capital and the main resorts, so they can support regional development.

• A smaller footprint: fewer, higher-spending visitors can earn the same income as many low-spending ones, with less pressure on the site.

These reasons explain why national governments, and not only private companies, design niche strategies. A national tourism organisation chooses which products to promote, a ministry sets visa and permit rules, and the state often invests in airports, roads and site conservation.

Adventure tourism

Adventure tourism is tourism built around physical challenge and a degree of perceived risk, usually in natural settings: trekking, mountaineering, white-water rafting, skydiving and bungee jumping. The risk is managed by commercial operators, so visitors buy the feeling of danger with a high level of safety.

New Zealand has built a global reputation for adventure tourism around Queenstown, a town of about 29,000 people on Lake Wakatipu in the South Island. AJ Hackett opened the world’s first commercial bungee jumping site on the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge near Queenstown in 1988, a year after his publicity jump from the Eiffel Tower. Jet-boating, skydiving, mountain biking and four ski areas now give Queenstown a year-round adventure product, marketed worldwide as part of New Zealand’s national brand.

Nepal shows the state using pricing to manage an adventure niche. Climbing Mount Everest from the Nepalese side requires a government permit, and in 2025 the government raised the spring permit fee for foreign climbers from US$11,000 to US$15,000, effective from September 2025, arguing that the money would help to tackle pollution and improve safety. Everest attracts climbers from almost every country, but its popularity has brought crowding near the summit and has put the risks on Nepali guides: an avalanche in April 2014 killed 16 Nepali guides on the climbing route.

Sources: Wikipedia, "AJ Hackett", "Queenstown, New Zealand" and "Mount Everest", 2026; Outside and AFP reports of the Nepal government’s fee revision, February 2025.

Movie location tourism

Movie location tourism (also called film-induced tourism) is travel to places that appear in films or television series, or where they were made. A successful film works as global advertising that the destination did not pay for, and it can turn an ordinary farm, castle or street into a site visitors want to see for themselves.

New Zealand is the best-known national example. The six films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were filmed there, and the national tourism organisation, Tourism New Zealand, used them in its global campaigns. The Hobbiton Movie Set on a sheep farm near Matamata, in the North Island, has offered guided tours of its 5.5 ha set since 2002, and a working Green Dragon inn opened on the set in 2012. Croatia gained in a similar way when the walled city of Dubrovnik became King’s Landing in the HBO series Game of Thrones: the city walls received 1.3 million visitors in 2018.

Film-induced demand can be short-lived, because it depends on the popularity of one product. It also concentrates visitors in the exact places seen on screen, so a small historic centre such as Dubrovnik’s, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1979, can become crowded. New Zealand reduced the first risk by building a permanent attraction at Hobbiton and linking the films to its wider landscape brand.

Heritage tourism

Heritage tourism is travel to experience the places, buildings, objects and traditions that represent the history and culture of a people. It includes ancient monuments, historic cities, religious sites and living cultural traditions such as festivals and crafts.

The strongest global brand in heritage tourism is the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. A site is inscribed when UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee judges it to have outstanding universal value. Listing obliges the state to protect the site and gives it worldwide recognition, often called the "UNESCO effect": visitor numbers tend to rise after inscription, because tour operators and guidebooks feature listed sites.

Machu Picchu, the fifteenth-century Inca citadel in the Andes of Peru, was inscribed in 1983 and received over 1.5 million visitors in 2025, about four times as many as in 2000. Most travel by train from Cusco to the town of Aguas Calientes below the site, which has grown rapidly to serve them.

Saudi Arabia is using heritage as part of its Vision 2030 plan to diversify its economy away from oil: Hegra (also called Mada’in Salih), a Nabataean city of rock-cut tombs in the AlUla region, became the country’s first World Heritage Site in 2008, and AlUla is now being developed with hotels, an airport and cultural events for international visitors after Saudi Arabia introduced tourist visas in 2019.

Heritage tourism creates a constant tension between conservation and access. Visitors pay for conservation through tickets and taxes, but large numbers wear down paths, steps and wall paintings, and new hotels, roads and cable cars can damage the setting that makes the site valuable. In 2017 UNESCO considered placing Machu Picchu on its List of World Heritage in Danger because of overcrowding, before deciding against it.

Dark tourism is a sub-type of heritage tourism: travel to places associated with death, suffering or disaster, such as battlefields, former prisons, genocide memorials and disaster zones. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, a World Heritage Site since 1979, received about 2.32 million visitors in 2019; Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park in Japan is another example. Dark tourism raises ethical questions about how sites of suffering should be presented, and how visitors should behave there.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Hobbiton Movie Set", "Dubrovnik", "Machu Picchu", "Tourism in Saudi Arabia" and "Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum", 2026.

Other niche products

Many other niches exist. Medical tourism is travel for treatment that is cheaper, faster or unavailable at home, for example to Thailand, Malaysia or Türkiye (Turkey). Wellness tourism sells spas, yoga retreats and health holidays. Gastronomic tourism is built around food and wine regions, such as Bordeaux or the street food of Bangkok. Space tourism is the most exclusive niche of all: commercial suborbital flights by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic began carrying paying passengers in 2021, at prices only the very wealthy can afford.

The role of the state

Niche strategies are national because governments shape them. A national tourism organisation markets the country as a brand, such as "100% Pure New Zealand", launched in 1999, or "Incredible India". Ministries set visa rules, permit systems and fees, and they invest in airports, heritage conservation and training. Governments also sponsor sport and culture to promote their image abroad: the "Visit Rwanda" logo has appeared on the sleeves of Arsenal shirts, as part of a national branding strategy aimed at high-spending visitors.

Niche tourism gives small or poorer countries a way to compete in a global market dominated by wealthy destinations. Nepal, with few other exports, earns foreign currency from trekkers and climbers; New Zealand, far from its main markets, attracts long-haul visitors by selling an experience they cannot get closer to home. Power in this market comes from owning a unique resource and controlling access to it.

Evaluating niche tourism strategies

Niche strategies are most successful when they are part of a wider national brand and spread across several products and regions, as in New Zealand, where adventure, film and landscape tourism reinforce each other. They are least secure where a whole region depends on one attraction, because the niche market can shrink suddenly or grow until it is no longer a niche.

Tourism TNCs and the expansion of destinations

A transnational corporation (TNC) is a company that operates in more than one country. Tourism is one of the most globalised industries, and a small number of tourism TNCs control much of the flow of international visitors: they sell the holidays, fly the planes, own or brand the hotels and run the cruise ships. Their decisions about where to invest help to explain which places become international destinations, as part of the wider process of globalisation.

Types of tourism TNC

Sources: Wikipedia, "Marriott International" and "Booking Holdings", citing company annual reports, 2026.

Vertical and horizontal integration

Tourism TNCs grow by integration. In vertical integration, one company owns businesses at different stages of the same supply chain, so that it can control the whole holiday and keep the profit from each stage. TUI Group, the world’s largest tourism company, owns travel agencies and booking websites, five European airlines with 134 aircraft, 353 hotels and 16 cruise ships, so a TUI customer can book, fly, stay and take excursions without spending money with any other company.

In horizontal integration, a company merges with or takes over other companies at the same stage of the chain, to gain market share, more brands and economies of scale. Marriott’s takeover of Starwood Hotels, completed in September 2016 for about US$13.6 billion, created the world’s largest hotel company by adding brands such as Sheraton and Westin to Marriott’s own.

An online travel agency (OTA) is a website or app that sells travel products, such as rooms, flights and car hire, from many suppliers and earns a commission on each booking. OTAs have shifted power in the industry: a small family hotel in Bali or Albania can reach customers worldwide through Booking.com or Airbnb, but it must pay commission to a foreign platform and depends on its reviews and search rankings.

How TNCs expand international destinations

TNCs turn places with primary touristic resources into international destinations in several ways:

• Capital: they invest in large hotels and resorts, or attract other investors with their brands, through foreign direct investment (FDI), the investment by a company in productive assets in another country.

• Global marketing and booking reach: a destination featured in a tour operator’s brochure or near the top of an OTA’s search results reaches millions of potential visitors.

• Air routes: airlines and tour operators’ charter flights make a place reachable. A new direct route from Europe can create a destination within a few years.

• Standards that reassure tourists: an international brand promises familiar rooms, food and safety, which lowers the perceived risk of visiting an unfamiliar country.

• New products: all-inclusive resorts and cruise itineraries open places that had little tourism before.

Foreign direct investment differs from aid or loans because the foreign company keeps ownership and control of what it builds. Governments compete for it with tax breaks, cheap land and relaxed planning rules, which is one reason why the benefits to the host country are debated.

An all-inclusive resort is a resort where the price paid in advance covers accommodation, meals, drinks and most activities. All-inclusive packages are popular with tourists because they make the cost predictable and feel safe. The Dominican Republic expanded its tourism largely through large all-inclusive resorts on its coasts, especially around Punta Cana, many of them run by Spanish and other foreign hotel chains: international arrivals rose from about 3.2 million in 2000 to 7.6 million in 2019.

Cruise lines spread tourism in a different way. One ship can bring several thousand passengers to a small island port for a day, and itineraries in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and Alaska have made places with a few thousand residents into regular international destinations. Because passengers sleep and eat on board, their spending in each port is limited to a few hours.

Sources: UN Tourism, via World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2026 (Dominican Republic arrivals); Wikipedia, "TUI Group" and "Marriott International", 2026.

Costs and benefits of TNC involvement for stakeholders

TNC involvement affects each stakeholder differently, and the same investment can benefit one group while harming another. A stakeholder table is the clearest way to compare them.

The balance depends largely on who owns what. Where local investors own the hotels under a franchise and buy food from local farms, a large share of spending stays in the country; where a foreign company owns the resort, imports its supplies and employs foreign managers, most of it leaves. Host governments have more power to secure benefits when they are wealthy, politically stable and have alternative investors, and less power when one TNC dominates a small economy.

Leakage

Leakage is the part of tourist spending that leaves the host economy instead of circulating within it. It happens through imports of food, drink, fuel and building materials; profits repatriated to foreign owners; wages paid to foreign staff who send them home; commissions to foreign tour operators, airlines and OTAs; and marketing spending abroad.

Leakage is highest in small economies that import most of what tourists consume and where foreign companies own most of the accommodation, such as many small island states. Widely cited UNEP estimates put leakage at about 80% of tourist spending in the Caribbean, about 70% in Thailand and about 40% in India, where a larger economy can supply more of what tourists buy. These figures are estimates made by different methods in different years, but they show a consistent pattern: the smaller and less diversified the economy, the more of each tourist dollar leaves it.

Sources: UNEP estimates, cited in Wikipedia, "Leakage effect", 2026.

The multiplier effect

Tourist spending that stays in the country does not stop with the first business that receives it. The multiplier effect (also called the tourism multiplier) is the process by which this spending is re-spent within the local economy, creating further income and jobs. Geographers and economists separate three rounds:

• Direct effects: spending by tourists in hotels, restaurants, shops, transport and attractions.

• Indirect effects: spending by those businesses on local suppliers, such as farmers, fishers, builders, laundries and taxi firms.

• Induced effects: spending by the workers of all these businesses on housing, food, school fees and services, which supports still more jobs.

Leakage and the multiplier are two sides of the same process. At each round, the money that leaks abroad stops creating local income, so the higher the leakage, the smaller the total effect. A simple estimate of the tourism multiplier divides 1 by the proportion of spending that leaks out of the local economy at each round:

Evaluating the role of TNCs

TNCs are often the fastest way for a country to enter international tourism, because they bring capital, brands, routes and customers that local firms cannot supply. The Dominican Republic’s growth shows how far they can expand a destination in two decades. The costs are high leakage, low-paid and seasonal jobs, and the loss of local control, and they are greatest where all-inclusive resorts and cruise ships capture almost all tourist spending.

The outcome depends on the terms a host government negotiates and on the type of tourism. Franchise and management contracts with local owners, rules that require local employment and supply, and taxes on visitors can keep more of the benefit in the country. Small states with few alternatives have the least bargaining power, so TNC involvement tends to bring the most benefit to countries that need it least, an issue of equity between places.

Tourism as a national development strategy

Many governments, especially in low- and middle-income countries, treat international tourism as a strategy for development: a way to earn foreign currency, create jobs and build infrastructure. Tourism is attractive because it uses resources a country already has, such as beaches, wildlife and heritage, and because tourists pay for these resources inside the country. Whether the strategy succeeds depends on how much of the spending is retained, who receives it and how exposed the country becomes to shocks.

Economic benefits

• Foreign exchange: tourists pay in foreign currency, which a country can use to pay for imports and debts. For many small states, tourism is the largest export.

• Contribution to gross domestic product: spending by tourists adds to national output directly, and indirectly through the multiplier effect.

• Employment: tourism is labour-intensive. It creates direct jobs in hotels, restaurants and transport and indirect jobs in farming, construction and crafts, many of them open to women and young people with few formal qualifications.

• Infrastructure: airports, roads, water supply, electricity and telecommunications built for tourism are also used by residents.

• Diversification: tourism reduces dependence on one or two primary exports such as crops or minerals, whose prices are volatile.

• Regional development: resorts, national parks and heritage sites are often in peripheral regions, so tourism can spread income away from the capital.

The bar chart shows how important tourism has become to some economies. In 2019 international tourism receipts were 84.7% of all export earnings in the Maldives and 80.4% in the Bahamas, compared with 9.4% in the United States and 8.0% in France, even though France receives more international arrivals than any other country. Dependence is greatest in small island states and in LICs and lower-middle-income countries with few other exports, such as The Gambia (43.6%) and Nepal (29.4%).

The Maldives shows the strategy at its most successful. Its first tourist resort opened in 1972, and the government adopted a model of one resort per uninhabited island, keeping most visitors apart from the inhabited islands. International arrivals grew from 467,000 in 2000 to 1.70 million in 2019, more than three visitors for every resident. Tourism paid for airports, ferries and public services, and the country rose to upper-middle income.

Sources: UN Tourism and IMF, via World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2026; Wikipedia, "Tourism in the Maldives", 2026.

Economic costs

The same features that make tourism attractive also create risks:

• Leakage: where foreign TNCs own the resorts and food is imported, much of the spending leaves the country, as the estimates for the Caribbean show.

• Seasonality: demand rises and falls through the year, so jobs and incomes are seasonal.

• Low-skill, low-paid jobs: many jobs are in cleaning, catering and security, with senior posts held by foreign staff.

• Inflation: demand from visitors and investors raises the price of land, housing and food for residents.

• Opportunity cost: public money spent on airports and resort infrastructure cannot be spent on schools, hospitals or farming.

• Vulnerability to shocks: pandemics, terrorism, political crises, hurricanes and exchange-rate swings can stop arrivals almost overnight, and the country has little control over them.

Seasonality is especially strong in destinations that depend on one climatic resource. Mediterranean beach resorts are crowded in July and August and almost empty in winter; The Gambia’s main season is the European winter, when visitors seek sunshine. Hotels close or cut staff in the low season, which keeps wages low and makes it hard for workers to build careers.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed the cost of dependence. When borders closed in 2020, arrivals in Fiji fell from 969,000 to 168,000 and tourism’s share of its export earnings fell from 49.7% to 17.8%; Cambodia’s arrivals fell from 6.6 million to 1.3 million. Countries with large tourism sectors and few other exports lost foreign exchange and jobs at the same time. The Gambia had already been hit in September 2019 by the collapse of the British tour operator Thomas Cook, one of its main sources of visitors, which shows how dependence on one foreign TNC adds to a country’s risk.

Sources: UN Tourism and IMF, via World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2026.

The scale of the collapse can be compared between countries by calculating percentage change, using arrivals data for three tourism-dependent countries.

Sources: UN Tourism, via World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2026.

Social and cultural effects

Tourism brings visitors and residents into contact, which changes both. The effects can be positive or negative, and they depend on the numbers and behaviour of visitors, the type of tourism and how far residents control it.

The demonstration effect is the process by which residents, especially young people, copy the behaviour, dress and spending of visitors, who appear wealthy and free because they are on holiday. It can raise aspirations and encourage education, but it can also create dissatisfaction, encourage migration and weaken respect for local traditions.

Commodification is the process by which culture, such as dances, ceremonies, crafts or religious objects, is turned into a product to be sold to visitors. Selling culture provides income and can keep traditions alive, but it changes their meaning when they are shortened, simplified or performed on demand. Maasai dances performed for safari tourists in Kenya and Tanzania are a frequently discussed example.

Commodification often leads to staged authenticity, a term used by the sociologist Dean MacCannell in the 1970s: a performance or setting designed to look like real local life, presented to tourists as authentic. A "traditional village" built for coach tours is an example. Visitors may believe they are seeing everyday life, while residents keep their real lives out of sight.

Over a longer period, contact can cause acculturation, the process by which a culture changes by borrowing from another, usually more dominant, culture. Global brands, languages and media brought by tourism can replace local foods, dress and languages. Acculturation is not caused by tourism alone, since television, the internet and migration have the same effect, but tourism concentrates contact in particular places.

Tourism can also displace people. In Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a World Heritage Site where Maasai pastoralists live alongside wildlife that attracts about 750,000 visitors a year, the government began moving Maasai residents to Msomera village, about 600 km away, in 2021. The government describes the relocation as voluntary and necessary for conservation; Human Rights Watch reports that it has been coercive and has not followed the principle of free, prior and informed consent. The dispute shows how conservation, tourism and indigenous people’s land rights can conflict.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Ngorongoro Conservation Area", citing the NCAA, IUCN World Heritage Outlook and Human Rights Watch, 2026.

Evaluating tourism as a development strategy

Whether tourism helps a country to develop depends on several conditions:

• The type of tourism: high-value niche tourism and locally owned guesthouses retain more income than all-inclusive resorts and cruise visits.

• Local control: where communities own or share in tourism businesses, as in community-based tourism, benefits stay local and cultural change is more on residents’ terms.

• Diversification: tourism works best as one sector among several; complete dependence leaves a country exposed to shocks such as COVID-19.

• Time: the effects change as a destination grows, as Butler’s model suggests, and residents’ attitudes can turn from welcome to hostility as numbers rise.

• Government capacity: taxes, planning rules and investment in training decide how much of the benefit reaches residents.

A reasoned judgment is that tourism is an effective development strategy for countries with distinctive primary resources and few alternatives, such as the Maldives or Nepal, because it brings foreign exchange and jobs that would not otherwise exist. It is a risky strategy when it becomes the only one, and its benefits are unequal unless governments reduce leakage and give residents a share of control.

The matrix brings the costs and benefits together by stakeholder and by type of effect. The same tourism project usually appears as a benefit in one cell and a cost in another: a resort that pays taxes to the government can also raise land prices for residents and damage reefs that fishers depend on.

Hosting international sporting events

A mega-event is a large, short-lived event of global significance that attracts very large numbers of visitors and a worldwide media audience, and that requires major investment by the host. The Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games and the FIFA World Cup are the largest. Others include the Winter Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, the Asian Games and world championships in athletics, cricket and rugby.

How hosts are chosen

Hosts are chosen by the international federations that own the events: the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the Olympics and FIFA for the World Cup. For most of their history both used a competitive bidding process: cities or countries spent years and many millions of dollars preparing plans, guarantees and lobbying campaigns, and the members of the IOC or FIFA’s Executive Committee then voted.

Secret votes by small committees created opportunities for corruption. On 27 May 2015 seven FIFA officials were arrested in Zürich, and 14 people were charged by the United States Department of Justice with offences including racketeering and money laundering; Swiss prosecutors opened a criminal inquiry into the awards of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter, announced in June 2015 that he would step down and was later banned from football.

Both bodies have since changed their methods. In June 2019 the IOC replaced open bidding with "continuous dialogue" between interested hosts and Future Host Commissions, followed by "targeted dialogue" with a preferred host. Brisbane, chosen for 2032, was the first Games awarded this way. FIFA rotates the World Cup between continents: by limiting the 2034 tournament to Asia and Oceania, it left Saudi Arabia as the sole bidder, and Saudi Arabia was confirmed as host in December 2024. Critics argue that these methods reduce the cost of bidding but also reduce transparency and competition.

Sources: Wikipedia, "2015 FIFA corruption case", "Bids for Olympic Games" and "2034 FIFA World Cup", 2026.

The geography of hosting

The map of Olympic host cities shows a strong concentration in Europe, North America and East Asia. Until 2016 no Summer Games had been held in South America, and no Summer or Winter Olympic Games have ever been held in Africa, the Middle East or South Asia. The FIFA World Cup has spread more widely, to South Africa in 2010, Brazil in 2014 and Qatar in 2022.

The pattern reflects power. Hosting needs money for stadiums, transport and security, guarantees from a stable government, existing hotels and airports, and influence within the IOC and FIFA, whose members were long drawn mainly from Europe and the Americas. The 2000s and 2010s brought what is sometimes called a "BRICS era" of emerging economies hosting: Beijing (2008 Summer Olympics), South Africa (2010 World Cup), Russia (2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 World Cup) and Brazil (2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro). The wealthy Gulf states followed, with Qatar in 2022 and Saudi Arabia in 2034.

Political factors

Governments host mega-events to gain soft power: the ability to influence other countries through attraction, such as culture, values and a positive image, rather than through military or economic force (hard power). A successful Games or World Cup presents the host as modern, open and capable to a global audience, attracts tourists and investors, and can build national unity at home.

Mega-events also expose hosts to political risk. A boycott is the deliberate refusal to take part in an event, or to buy from or deal with a country or organisation, as a form of protest. More than 60 countries, led by the United States, joined the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union and its allies boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Games in return.

Hosts are now scrutinised by human rights organisations and the media. Groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accuse some governments of sportswashing: using sport, by hosting events, sponsoring teams or buying clubs, to improve an international reputation damaged by human rights abuses. The accusation was made against Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022 and Saudi Arabia for 2034; the governments concerned reject it and point to reforms and to the openness that events bring.

Other political factors include political stability and security (an athletes’ village and dozens of venues must be protected), the guarantees governments give to the IOC or FIFA (for example, to cover any deficit), and the use of an event for nation-building, as when South Africa presented the 2010 World Cup as a celebration of the first African host.

Economic factors

Mega-events are very expensive. Hosts build or renovate stadiums, athletes’ villages, airports, roads and rail lines, and pay for security. A study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that every Olympic Games since 1960 has run over budget, at an average of 172% in real terms. London 2012 went 76% over budget from bid to completion; in 2007 its public funding package was revised to about £9.3 billion.

Most event revenue goes to the owning organisation rather than the host. Broadcasting rights and global sponsorship are sold by the IOC and FIFA, while the host pays for most of the infrastructure. Hosts gain ticket sales, local sponsorship and visitor spending, but visitor numbers can be smaller than expected, because the event crowds out ordinary tourists who avoid high prices and congestion.

The strongest economic argument for hosting is legacy: the long-term effects that remain after the event. London 2012 was planned around the regeneration of about 200 ha of former industrial land in Stratford, east London. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park reopened in 2013–2014; the athletes’ village became the East Village, with 2,818 homes, 1,379 of them affordable; the stadium became the home of West Ham United from 2016; and a cultural district (East Bank) with university and museum buildings followed. Critics argue that much of the new housing is unaffordable for the area’s original residents and that the predicted rise in sports participation did not happen.

The opposite outcome is a white elephant: an expensive facility that is little used and costly to maintain after the event. Many venues built for the Athens 2004 Olympics fell into disuse. For the 2014 World Cup, Brazil built the 42,924-seat Arena da Amazônia in Manaus, a city in the Amazon with no top-division club, at a cost of about R$605 million; it hosted four World Cup matches and since then has had light use, with local matches drawing small crowds and high maintenance costs.

Sources: Flyvbjerg, Budzier and Lunn, "Regression to the tail: why the Olympics blow up", Environment and Planning A, 2021; Wikipedia, "2012 Summer Olympics", "Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park" and "Arena da Amazônia", 2026.

Cultural factors

Cultural factors affect both whether a country wants to host and how the event works. A strong sporting tradition and fan culture fill stadiums and keep them in use afterwards, as in Germany in 2006; existing venues reduce costs. Climate and the sporting calendar matter: Qatar’s summer daytime temperatures often exceed 40 °C, so its World Cup was moved to November and December 2022, interrupting European league seasons for the first time. Laws and customs on alcohol, dress and LGBTQ+ rights shape visitors’ experience and can lead to criticism from abroad.

Public opinion in the host city has become a major factor. Residents in several European and North American cities have rejected bids in referendums, mostly over cost: in Hamburg, 51.6% voted against a bid for the 2024 Olympics in November 2015, and in Calgary, 56.4% voted against a bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics in November 2018, when the Games were projected to cost the city CAN$5 billion. Such votes help to explain why fewer democratic, wealthy cities now bid, and why hosting has shifted towards states where governments face fewer public votes on spending.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Hamburg bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics", "Calgary bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics" and "Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup bid", 2026.

Political, economic and cultural factors interact. Wealthy autocratic states can afford the cost and face no referendums, so they gain a growing share of events, while the events’ owners benefit from guaranteed spending. Democracies with strong sporting cultures can host most cheaply, using existing venues, as Los Angeles plans to do for 2028, but public resistance to cost makes their governments cautious. Long-term benefits for the host remain disputed: a better image and new transport links are common legacies, while promised increases in sport participation and lasting tourism growth rarely appear.

The flow diagram links the three groups of factors to the selection of a host and to the two outcomes an event can leave. Which outcome follows depends largely on whether venues and transport were planned for use after the event.

Case study: Qatar and the 2022 FIFA World Cup

Qatar is a small, very wealthy state on a peninsula in the Persian Gulf, with a population of about 2.97 million in 2025 and a gross national income per capita of US$74,330 in 2025 (Atlas method), one of the highest in the world. Its wealth comes from natural gas and oil. Migrant workers, mainly from South Asia, the Philippines and Egypt, make up about 91% of the population and about 95% of the labour force. Almost all of the population lives in and around the capital, Doha.

On 2 December 2010 FIFA’s Executive Committee chose Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, the first held in the Middle East and in an Arab country. Qatar won in the fourth round of voting with 14 votes, although FIFA’s own evaluation had graded its bid as carrying a "high operational risk". The tournament was played from 20 November to 18 December 2022, the first World Cup held outside the northern summer, because daytime temperatures in Qatar in June and July often exceed 40 °C.

Why Qatar bid

• Soft power and national image: a small state between larger neighbours used global sport to make itself known and valued internationally, alongside its ownership of the French club Paris Saint-Germain since 2011, Qatar Airways’ sponsorship of football clubs and the beIN Sports broadcasting network.

• Diversification: under its national development plan, Qatar National Vision 2030, the government wants to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons, and tourism, aviation and events are part of that plan.

• Infrastructure: the event gave a deadline for transport and urban projects, including the Doha Metro and the new city of Lusail, north of Doha.

• Regional standing: hosting presented Qatar as the representative of the Arab world in global sport.

Preparing the event

The tournament used eight stadiums in five cities, all within about 50 km of central Doha; seven were built new and the Khalifa International Stadium was renovated. Lusail Stadium, which held the final, seats 88,966. Most stadiums used cooling systems designed to lower temperatures inside by up to 20 °C. Because the venues were so close together, 24 of the 32 teams had base camps within 10 km of each other, and FIFA described it as the most compact World Cup since the first, in 1930.

The three-line Doha Metro opened its first line in May 2019, with 37 stations on about 76 km of track, and carried 9.19 million trips during the group stage alone. Stadium 974, built from 974 shipping containers (974 is Qatar’s international dialling code), was designed to be taken apart after the tournament and rebuilt elsewhere; by December 2025 it had not been dismantled and still stood on its site at Ras Abu Aboud. Other stadiums were planned to lose their upper tiers, to be donated to countries with less sports infrastructure.

Costs

Financial. Estimates of the total cost of over US$220 billion, which would make it the most expensive World Cup ever held, include roads, the metro, the airport, hotels and the new city of Lusail. Qatari officials dispute this and put the cost of the tournament itself at about US$8 billion, arguing that the infrastructure was part of national plans that would have been built anyway. The difference between the two figures is a question of definition: what counts as a cost of the event.

Social: migrant workers. The construction depended on hundreds of thousands of migrant workers employed under the kafala system, which tied each worker’s legal status to an employer who controlled whether they could change jobs or leave the country.

In February 2021 The Guardian reported that as many as 6,500 South Asian migrant workers may have died in Qatar since the award in 2010, not all of them on World Cup projects; Qatar disputed the figure, and the International Labour Organization (ILO) called it misleading, because it counted all deaths among South Asian migrants, from any cause, and linked them to World Cup sites without that context. Amnesty International concluded that Qatar had failed to investigate, address and prevent the deaths of many workers.

Under international pressure, Qatar introduced reforms. In August 2020 the government removed the rule that workers needed their employer’s permission to change jobs, and announced a minimum wage of 1,000 Qatari riyals (about US$275) a month for all workers, which came into force in March 2021. The ILO, which opened a project office in Doha in 2018, worked with the government on the reforms, and a state fund was set up to repay workers whose employers had not paid their wages. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reported in 2025 that abuses such as wage theft continued and that the reforms had had limited impact.

Political and cultural. Human rights groups accused Qatar of sportswashing, pointing to the treatment of workers and the criminalisation of same-sex relationships. Allegations of bribery in the 2010 vote, examined in the FIFA corruption investigations from 2015, were denied by Qatar. Days before the opening match the organisers reversed a promise that beer would be sold at stadiums, although fan zones sold alcohol. These disputes meant that much of the global coverage before the tournament was negative, the opposite of the image Qatar sought.

Environmental. Air-conditioned stadiums, the construction of new venues, and over a million international visitors flying into a small country produced large emissions; organisers argued that compact venues, the metro and demountable stadiums reduced them. A stadium designed to be moved but still standing three years later shows how difficult it is to deliver such legacy promises.

Benefits

By FIFA’s figures the tournament was a commercial and sporting success. Total attendance was 3,404,252, an average of 53,191 per match and 96.3% of capacity; over a million visitors travelled to Qatar for matches; the FIFA Fan Festival in Al Bidda Park had over 1.8 million visits; and 20,000 volunteers were chosen from 420,000 applications. FIFA estimated that around five billion people engaged with the tournament; in the United Kingdom alone, 51.2 million people watched some of it.

For Qatar the main gains were long-term: an expanded airport, the metro and roads, a global profile, and a tourism industry that grew after the event. Qatar had received 2.94 million international arrivals in 2015, but numbers fell during the blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt from June 2017 to January 2021, when Saudi Arabia closed Qatar’s only land border, and collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the World Cup, Qatar Tourism counted 4.05 million visitors in 2023 and 5.08 million in 2024, a record and a 25% increase.

Qatar Tourism now aims to nearly triple visitor numbers between 2022 and 2030 and to raise tourism’s total contribution to GDP to 10–12%. Some of the growth since 2022 comes from the end of the blockade, since Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states provide 41% of visitors, many arriving by road, so the effect of the World Cup on tourism cannot be separated cleanly from other causes.

Impacts on different stakeholders

How successful was hosting?

The 2022 World Cup was well organised and achieved its sporting and audience goals, and Qatar gained infrastructure and a larger tourism industry. Whether it was worth the cost depends on whose costs are counted. For the Qatari state, which could afford over US$200 billion of investment, the financial burden was manageable and much of the infrastructure is in use. For many of the migrant workers who built it, the costs were serious and in some cases fatal, and the reforms they gained were real but incompletely enforced.

The case shows that the soft power gained from hosting is uncertain. A mega-event attracts attention to everything about a host, including what its government would rather hide, so the image a country gains depends on how it responds to scrutiny. It also shows the power of wealth: a small state could win and deliver the world’s largest single-sport event, which only a few countries could have afforded, and that decision was taken by a small FIFA committee rather than by the people most affected.

Sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2026; FIFA, Annual Report 2022 ("FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 in numbers"); Qatar Tourism, press release, January 2025; Wikipedia, "2022 FIFA World Cup", "Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup bid", "Migrant workers in Qatar", "Qatar diplomatic crisis", "Doha Metro" and "Stadium 974", 2026.

• Explain why the cost of the 2022 World Cup can be given as US$8 billion or as over US$220 billion.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of the labour reforms of 2020 for different groups of migrant workers.

• To what extent did hosting the World Cup increase Qatar’s soft power?

Exam practice

Questions on tourism and sport at the international scale appear in Paper 1 as a 10-mark structured question on a stimulus, often a table of tourism data, a map of event hosts or a stakeholder diagram, and a choice of 10-mark extended questions on niche tourism, TNCs, tourism and development, or hosting.

Structured question

The table shows international tourism receipts as a percentage of total exports for five countries.

Sources: UN Tourism and IMF, via World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2026.

Extended response

Extended questions often ask you to weigh the costs and benefits of hosting, of TNC involvement or of tourism-led development. A strong answer is built on a named case study and at least one contrasting example.

Summary

• Niche tourism sells a specialised product to a particular market; countries use adventure, movie location and heritage tourism to compete globally with a unique primary resource, as in New Zealand, Nepal, Croatia and Peru.

• National governments shape niche strategies through branding, visas, permits and investment, giving small or poorer countries power in a global market.

• Tourism TNCs (hotel groups, tour operators, cruise lines, OTAs, airlines) expand destinations through capital, marketing, routes and all-inclusive models, and grow by vertical and horizontal integration.

• TNC involvement brings FDI, jobs and infrastructure, but also leakage, low-paid seasonal jobs and loss of control; the balance differs by stakeholder.

• Leakage is spending that leaves the host economy; the multiplier effect is spending re-spent within it. Reducing leakage increases the multiplier.

• Tourism as a development strategy earns foreign exchange and jobs, but dependence, seasonality and shocks such as COVID-19 make it risky; social and cultural effects include revival, commodification, staged authenticity and acculturation.

• Hosting mega-events depends on political (soft power, boycotts, sportswashing), economic (costs, overruns, legacy, white elephants) and cultural (tradition, climate, public opinion) factors, and has concentrated in wealthy and emerging economies.

• Qatar’s 2022 World Cup brought infrastructure, global attention and tourism growth, at a disputed financial cost and serious costs for migrant workers.

Self-check

• To do:

  I can distinguish mass tourism from niche tourism and explain why countries pursue niche strategies.

• To do:

  I can describe adventure, movie location and heritage tourism with a named country for each.

• To do:

  I can explain how TNCs expand destinations and draw a diagram of vertical and horizontal integration.

• To do:

  I can evaluate the costs and benefits of TNC involvement for at least five stakeholders.

• To do:

  I can draw the multiplier and leakage diagram and estimate a simple tourism multiplier.

• To do:

  I can evaluate tourism as a national development strategy, including its social and cultural effects.

• To do:

  I can examine the political, economic and cultural factors that affect who hosts mega-events.

• To do:

  I can evaluate the costs and benefits of the 2022 World Cup for Qatar and its stakeholders.

Good answers may be well structured (AO4) and may additionally offer a critical evaluation (AO3) which weighs technology against other causes and recognizes that causes interact: cheap flights only increase tourism where people have the income and holiday time to use them. Another approach might be to argue that the importance of technology varies between places (smartphone leisure has spread rapidly in low-income countries where other leisure facilities are scarce) and between groups (older people, rural residents, low-income households). The answer may conclude that technology is an enabling factor rather than the main cause.

For 5–6 marks, expect some weakly-evidenced outlining of how technology and/or other factors have changed leisure patterns.

For 7–8 marks, expect a structured account which includes:

• either well-evidenced explanation of the role of technological change and of other causes of changing leisure patterns

• or a discursive conclusion (or ongoing evaluation) grounded in geographical concepts and/or perspectives.

For 9–10 marks, expect both of these traits.

NB. Maximum [6] if only technological change is considered.

Markbands (10 marks, 2 marks per band)