The effects of food festival experience on a regional community economic and social well-being: Hervey Bay Seafood Festival Research Project

Local events play an important role to stimulate host economies and provide a platform for social engagement amongst community members. While the various social and economic impacts of local events are well-established in academic literature, the research surrounding the mechanisms through which these events contribute to enhancing local wellbeing and destination image is still in infancy. The Hervey Bay Seafood Festival (HBSF) has a twenty-year history and could be described, according to Allen et al. (2011), as a local community event or festival. Like many such festivals it grew out of the need for a local industry to collaborate amongst its network of actors and holistically promote the industry for market growth. However, in the absence of a rigorous investigation of the socio-economic impacts of this festival, the contributions to the local economy and community wellbeing remains unknown. Therefore, the overall goal for this research was to identify the drivers of economic and social outcomes of this festival.