Edited by two leading scholars in the field, this is the first title in a new Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Tourism. It is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research in event tourism.

The origins of event tourism as a topic of serious academic interest are comparatively recent. The subject is largely a postwar development which began especially to unfold in the 1970s, not least in response to a growing interest and recognition of the potential value of events to economies, societies, and their cultures, as well as to environmental regeneration. In part, the continued evolution of the subject has arisen from the development of convention and exhibition management as cognate areas but, through time, policy-makers, planners, and destination managers became aware of the potentially significant and wide role of events in specific localities, ranging in scale from the Olympic Games to community festivals.

Event tourism is now a vibrant and dynamic field of study and research, and the sheer scale of the growth in its output makes this Routledge collection especially timely. A wide range of social-science journals have published material about event tourism and this new Major Work makes available foundational pieces of scholarship—as well as cutting-edge research—from these disparate, and sometimes less accessible sources, as well as from the leading UK, European, and North American tourism journals, and from other hard-to-find publications.

As well as bringing together the key studies and journal articles that have shaped serious thought about event tourism, the collection will be welcomed as the first mapping of an area that to date has lacked an interdisciplinary synthesis. The thematic organization of the collection, together with the editors’ introductions and their commentaries on the collected texts, will make sense of the wide range of approaches, theories, and concepts that have informed event tourism, and will review the history of the subject and the rise of its identity and research agenda. It is an essential collection destined to be valued as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.