2012 Olympics Impact on Bedford Hotels

2012 Olympics Impact on Bedford Hotels



2012 Olympics Impact on Bedford Hotels

Introduction

The idea behind giving out this project was to study the impact of 2012 Olympic Games on Hotels in Bedford so that the client could prepare and adapt an appropriate strategy to benefit from the event in the most efficient manner. The team studies this from three different perspectives, the pre Olympics stage, the Olympic year and the legacy or post Olympic phase. The group determines this by researching and studying the occupancy trends of the past few cities around the world that have had the opportunity to host the international Olympics. It looks at the effects in which the Olympic Games and their associated activities have had on the hotel industry of the individual cities before forecasting the Bedford hotel situation in 2012.

Discussion

The evaluation of the economic importance of the Olympics to a host city, its region and country has become an important aspect of the overall evaluation of the value or worth of hosting the Olympic Games. These evaluations are often known as economic impact assessments or reports, and are increasingly being used in the early stages of the Olympic bidding process1. It is vitally important that the host city and the organising committee in the host city are aware of the scale of the economic benefits that hosting the Games may bring (Brown, Adam and Joanne Massey, 2001).

This allows the Games to be promoted in the local context as bringing significant benefits to the local economy as well as providing the organising committee with the scale of benefits so that it can have an improved understanding of how large the costs of bidding for and hosting the games should be. As Brown and Massey (2001:26) note, hosting the Olympics has not always brought financial reward. The 1972 Munich Olympics and 1976 Montreal Olympics made losses of £178 million and £692 million. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics made surpluses of £215 million and £2 million (Airola, Jim and Steven Craig, 2000). This increased economic performance of Games organisers, as well as the increased economic impact of the Games is due to a larger market, particularly for television rights to the Games, but also because the higher costs of the Games with larger competitor numbers and higher expectations of the quality of Olympic venues has meant that organising committees have had to justify these costs and therefore have been driven to increase revenues and economic impacts performance of the Games organisers is a very narrow definition of the economic benefits from hosting the Olympics. The wider economic impact of the Olympic Games includes the effects that the visitors to the Games have on the local economy through their expenditures in the host city, the developmental benefits of targeted infrastructural investments in deprived areas and the long-term 'legacy' benefits that the increased exposure to the international media brings through increased tourist arrivals and tourism receipts in the ...