Predicting sustainability for slowtourism events

Abstract

The increasing demand for slow tourism in rural regions is leading many organizations to reorganize events by planning new strategies able to predict the impact of incoming visitors and new stakeholders. Typical economic benefit-cost analysis often cannot be used in such contexts in which it is hard to predict socio-economic impacts that are the most relevant. In this way, a methodology like the SROI Method, based on a wide set of indicators and a flexible analytical method, could give a prediction estimation useful to predict socio-economic impacts and tailored for a wide set of people. In this paper we consider three examples taken from small villages around Rome for which a set of events has been analyzed through a revised SROI Method in which we calculate the corresponding SROI value and compare it under a set of revised stages named as—SMARTOUR SROI focused on Slow Tourism Planning. The proposed evaluation methodology obtained by the application of the SROI Method to smart tourism stages is a first example of new sustainable analysis for slow tourism. The result shows that the methodology always gives a positive evaluation by highlighting the main issues related to the impact of slow tourism in such emerging scenarios. Moreover, in the discussion we can show that the case of the historical train example gives the best result due to the particular impact of such a typical scenario.