Understanding the values and impact for a hallmark event is crucial knowledge not only for the event managers but also for the public planners of the host region.
The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare values of a music event using on the one hand two non-market valuation techniques; and on the other hand individual measures of subjective well-being or happiness.
We use survey data collected from 716 visitors to the Peace & Love music festival held in Borlänge, Sweden, in 2011. The survey contains questions about the actual behaviour of the respondents such as expenditure patterns and travel behaviour but also questions on individuals’ subjective wellbeing (SWB) and willingness to pay (WTP) for certain features of the festival like “other people attending” and “length of the festival”. These data allow us to estimate consumer surplus for the event by applying the travel cost method but also average and individual measures of SWB. The latter can be used to explore correlations between individual’s SWB and individual socio economic characteristics but also consumer behaviour patterns.
The preliminary findings of our study are that the consumer surplus value indicates an overall consumer value between 27 - 89 MSEK for the festival. The measure of happiness shows an average subjective wellbeing of 7.94 (likert scale 0-10) and correlations with a number of interesting variables. This paper contributes to the literature on valuation of tourism and events by highlighting the potential for using measures of consumer surplus in combination with actual visitor data on preferences to understand current and future impact and values of an event.