Tourist displacement in two South African sport mega-events

Crowding-out (or displacement) of non-event visitors has received little attention in the literature on the impact of sports events, largely because it cannot be measured accurately. This paper discusses such effects in conceptual terms and reports the results of an analysis of data on tourist arrivals in South Africa aimed at estimating the displacement effects of two sports events held in 2009: the Indian Premier League cricket tournament and the British and Irish Lions rugby tour. Using monthly tourist arrivals in South Africa from specific countries, we find that some tourists from countries not participating in these events were displaced; the much stronger effect, however, was that tourists from the participating countries re-arranged their visits to coincide with an event. While confirming the inherent difficulty of measuring crowding-out effects, this paper shows that characteristics of events can sometimes be exploited to obtain useful information on displacement from readily available data.