Exploring the relation between festivals and host cities on Twitter: a study on the impacts of Lucca Comics & Games

This article investigates the relation between festivals and their destination cities. We examine what festival attendees think about the festival experience and the host city, and how the online image of the host city is shaped through the dissemination of these opinions on Twitter. We conduct a case study and analyze the opinions about a big scale event, Lucca Comics & Games and its host city, Lucca. Our results indicate that the festival significantly reinforces the online image of the host city on social media and not only promotes the existing strong characteristics of the city, such as historic monuments and architectural elements, but also enriches the portrayal of the city by relating the existing legacy to the fantasy culture with the festival experience. This study sheds light on the social aspects of emergent digital information practices and platforms within the context of festivals. Furthermore, our methodological framework serves as a model for prospective research on the relationship between events and cities and contributes to the development of a common methodological framework for the empirical assessment of this relation.