Festival Gap : Comparing Organizers' Perceptions of Visitors to a Survey of Visitors at the Carolina Renaissance Festival, 2005

Abstract

In many cases, festival organizers simply "guess" at the characteristics and motivations of their visitors. The organization, planning and marketing of festivals can greatly benefit from an analysis of visitors. This particularly the case with specialty or niche type events such as Renaissance Festivals. Bridging the gap between festival organizers' perceptions of visitors and the actual patterns in visitation is essential for marketing. This thesis seeks to explore what festival organizers really know about the characteristics and motivations of their visitors, using the Carolina Renaissance Festival in Huntersville North Carolina as a case study. Renaissance-themed festivals are a style of (cultural) heritage tourism festival that has been under analyzed in scholarly research. Interviews were conducted with the Carolina Renaissance Festival organizers and a survey was used to collect data from visitors. Using chi-square test and a t-test statistics, gaps were for various variables related to visitor demographics, motivation, the level of intensity of visit, and general opinions. Results indicate that organizers of the Carolina Renaissance Festival generally did well in estimating the demographic characteristics of visitors but did less well in predicting motivations.