Assessing the Territorial Embeddedness of Events in Tourism Destinations: A Transparent Criteria-Based Scoring Model

The fact that an international event is held in a particular city does not mean that the event is durably attached to that place. This paper develops a transparent model for assessing the territorial embeddedness of an event, defined as the extent to which its content, control, recurrence and public identity are bound to a host destination, and specifies how the resulting composite score should and should not be interpreted. Building on research in event tourism, event portfolio management and economic geography, four criteria are proposed: dependence on local resources, local governance and brand rights, recurrence at the destination, and place identification. Each criterion is scored 0, 0.5 or 1, with a separate “unknown” state, and the scores are combined by an equal-weight arithmetic mean. The scoring rules were tested on four stylised profiles and on official documentary evidence for two events hosted in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The stylised profiles produced composite scores of 0.875, 0.500, 0.500 and 0.250. The two profiles scoring 0.500 had entirely different structures, and their relative ranking depended wholly on the weights, reversing in 49.8% of 100,000 random weight draws. Recording a missing criterion as zero pushed the score to the lower bound of its admissible interval (0.625–0.875 in the test case). The criterion profile, the evidence behind each score and the interval bounds should therefore be reported alongside the composite. The model is a planning instrument rather than a measure of economic impact, and its inter-rater reliability must be established before operational use.