A Research on the Impacts of Festival over Culture Tourism : Centering on the Edinburgh Festival and Leeds West Indian Carnival
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Bok-rae 
Published: June 2018

Nowadays, festivals are considered as a 'worldwide tourism phenomenon'. In particular, the UK - in the transition from colonial empire into the great tourist nation - they exercise a huge influence on the British cultural and economic development. That is to say, the festival organizers actively tend to use not only the British history and cultural themes to attract many tourists toward the UK as the 'glorious vanguard of modern West civilization, but also to create the positively cultural image of the festival destination. The reason of why the UK organizes so many cultural events is that tourism and economic opportunities can bring sooner or later social and cultural benefits to the country.
In the last decades, the roles among the three parties: government-private sector-local community have changed in the section of event and tourism industry. As above, the UK known as the 'nation of tradition & gentleman' supports cultural events and festivals in order to make strong economy, firm nation-building and culture tourism development strategy. By breaking from the past laisser-faire policy and negative/passive government role, the UK is now eagerly engaged in the campaign of national tourism development and world promotion. This means that the growth of tour industry can be the 'prime mover' in the recovery of the British economy under the depression.
The aim of this paper is to analyze not only the role of culture tourism in creating the community-oriented events and festivals, but also the impacts of festivals on the culture tourism. As a case study, we will present two examples of the British multi-cultural festivals and events: Edinburg festivals and Leeds West Indian carnival. The event which is an effective market instrument can attract cultural tourists in the world. The festival and cultural event contribute to the development of culture tourism. Furthermore, they promote the relationship between 'hosts and guests'. They attract consumption-oriented cultural tourists possessing big purchasing power. On the other hand, the culture tourism brings a lot of benefits to the festival destination, but any systematical research on this subject has not been done yet.
The festival exercises direct/indirect influences on local economy. The local specialities and services that outer visitors consume during the festival have direct impacts on local economy and business, but the culture tourism industry is not necessarily interested in the loss of local beauty and the environmental degradation. That is, the festival organizer and local government only take account of the economic benefits, but they ignore the implication of socio-cultural impacts on the festival. Thus, famous scholars like Goldblatt, Getz and Hall insist that greater attention should be paid to the socio-cultural impacts over festival.
Through the development of local festivals, the culture tourism has developed and such festivals have brought a lot of economic and cultural benefits to the local community. In the case of Edinburgh festival and Leeds carnival we observe that the socio-economic elements of the festival can contribute to the growth of culture tourism. The Edinburgh festival and Leeds carnival attract many domestic and foreign tourists. As stated above, the two festivals bring the economic growth and benefits to the local economy and community, but only in-depth study can help us to comprehend the level of socio-economic impacts of two festivals.
Finally, I’d like to suggest some useful lessons learned from Edinburgh Festival and Leeds carnival for the Korean nation dreaming of cultural great nation strategy in the future. It is necessary to develop various creative culture contents that we could observe in the Edinburgh festivals. I took part in many Korean local culture festivals, but the contents of Korean regional festivals seemed to be very similar and monotonous.