At the Italian Grand Prix, the fleet of guest vehicles arrives on German plates with German drivers, stays at hotels in Milan, and returns to Germany with the catering, the hospitality furniture, and most of the revenue.
The author spent years in Formula One operations, and the Monza pattern is one of the clearest in the sport. On race weekend, the fleet of guest vehicles arrives on German plates with German drivers. The hospitality guests do not sleep in Monza, which pays for the race and has too few hotels. They sleep in Milan, which pays nothing.
The town that hosted the event captured a fraction of what the event generated, and the traffic between the two cities cost it again.
The race weekend produces gross spend on transport, accommodation, catering, and hospitality. Follow it, and most of it leaves Monza the moment it is spent. The vehicles are supplied from outside the country. The rooms are in another city. The catering contract may be national.
Leakage is value that enters the local economy through visitor spend and then leaves it. It is measured category by category, because the fix for accommodation leakage is not the fix for transport leakage.
The town that hosts the event captures a fraction of what the event generates.
Monza is a small town beside a large city, so the pattern is visible. In a national economy the same thing happens across a border rather than a municipal boundary, and it is invisible unless someone measures it.
Absorptive capacity is the concept behind both cases: how much demand a place’s supply chain can take on before the value leaks to imports, to the next city, or to the operator who flew in for the week. Monza’s absorptive capacity for a Grand Prix is low, and the event’s value flows to where the capacity is.
A host cannot build a hotel district for one weekend a year. It can decide which categories of spend it wants to keep, and act on those. A local supplier condition on the transport contract. A hospitality village on site rather than in the city. A procurement rule for catering.
Each of those is a decision that can be tested before it is signed: what it retains, what it displaces, what it costs. Signed blind, a rule that helps one sector taxes another.
Events are often sold to a town on gross figures that were always going to leave. The honest question is not how much the event generates but how much the town keeps, and that depends on decisions the town controls.
The case is in the test was the World Cup. The method is on the page for supply-chain resilience and leakage.
Before the next hosting agreement, ask for the leakage by category, not the gross figure. Then ask which two categories the town could keep with a procurement condition. Put those in the contract.
A hotel, a resort, or a mixed-use scheme fails underwriting when a single route, a single annual event, or a single source market turns out to be carrying more of the demand case than the committee realised. The dependency is the risk, and it can be measured before signature.
None of the three states what it includes, what period it covers, or whether the money stayed. A footprint figure is only useful when it carries its own definitions, and it is only defensible when it is kept separate from impact.
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International arrivals to the United States fell 4.2% in 2025 while worldwide travel grew about 4%. Living Lab’s displacement model puts the forgone spending at roughly US$50bn, and about US$10.6bn of it within reach of five economies. Each is limited by a different constraint.
At the Italian Grand Prix, the fleet of guest vehicles arrives on German plates with German drivers. The hospitality guests do not sleep in Monza, which hosts the race. They sleep in Milan, which does not. The town that pays captures a fraction of what the event generates.
On 13 June 2026 Scotland played Haiti at Gillette Stadium. Around 50,000 Scottish supporters travelled. Boston’s bars sold beer at roughly four times the volume of a Fourth of July weekend, and some ran dry. Every signal that would have warned them was visible weeks ahead.
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