49 terms used in visitor economy intelligence. Where a term has a looser meaning in general use, the definition here is the one that applies to every figure on this site.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Absorptive capacity | How much demand a place's supply chain can take on before the value leaks: to imports, to the next city, or to an operator who flew in for the week. A host city whose bars ran dry under 50,000 supporters had reached it. So had the Grand Prix town whose guests slept in the next city. It is the idea behind sequencing, and why a calendar is paced to what the place can absorb. |
| Additionality | The share of an outcome that would not have happened without the decision being assessed. The opposite of deadweight. Every Living Lab figure states whether it is gross or additional, because a funder is paying for the additional part only. |
| Attributable | A figure from which the counterfactual, displacement, and leakage have been removed. What remains is what the decision changed. |
| Audit-ready | A figure that carries its basis, confidence, as-of date, and model run, so a reviewer can retrace the path from input to output rather than take the number on trust. A property of the working, not a certification. |
| Base case | The reference scenario against which the others are measured: what happens if nothing changes. The first row of every scenario table, and the row that shows what a business case adds. |
| Basis | What a figure rests on: the source data, the assumption set, and the method version. One of the four things every Living Lab number opens to show, with confidence, as-of date, and model run. |
| Binding constraint | The first limit a plan reaches, which is not always the largest. For a destination absorbing displaced demand it may be beds, air access, or the size of the calendar. Relieve it and the modelled capture becomes reachable. |
| Compression night | A night on which a major event or a seasonal peak pushes hotel demand well above the norm, so that rate rises and rooms sell out. A market can show healthy annual occupancy and still turn away demand on the 18 compression nights a year. |
| Confidence | The stated range around a figure, reflecting how much of it is observed and how much modelled or inferred. |
| Convention bureau | The body that bids to bring congresses and conventions to a destination, usually with an incentive fund. Distinct from the association or organiser that runs the congress. |
| Counterfactual | What would have happened without the decision. It is the most important assumption in any impact figure. Agree and document it before the result is produced, and never adjust it afterwards to fit a preferred number. |
| Deadweight | Activity that would have happened anyway, counted as if the decision caused it. Removed before a figure is called attributable. Related to, and measured separately from, displacement and leakage. |
| Demand vector | Demand broken into the parts a decision needs: origin, route, timing, length of stay, price sensitivity, and purpose, each with the signal behind it. A total gives one number. A vector adds where from, when, for how long, and what would change it. |
| Destination marketing organisation (DMO) | The body that markets a destination to visitors and reports arrivals and spend to a board. |
| Displacement | Demand that moved from one place, business, or time to another rather than being created. Visitors who would have come anyway, residents crowded out of a venue, spend that shifted from one weekend to the next. An event that grows the economy and one that rearranges it look identical until displacement is measured. |
| Downside case | The scenario in which the assumption that most worries the committee turns out to be true: the route is cut, the rival wins the bid, the summer is hotter. Stated so that the cost of being wrong is priced alongside the cost of acting. |
| Ex-ante, ex-post | Before and after. An ex-ante case is the forecast that justifies a decision; an ex-post result is the measurement of what it delivered. The OECD's Recommendation on Global Events and Local Development asks for both, on the same method, so the two can be set against each other. |
| Fiscal return | The tax, retained spend, and avoided cost that flow back to the public purse from a decision. Reported separately from wider public outcomes, never blended into one number. |
| Fixed effects | A statistical method that measures each unit, such as each hotel, against its own history rather than against a city average. It is how a tournament's rate premium was found to be plus 30% in one city and minus 4.5% in another, when the national average said plus 13% for both. |
| Footprint | The total ongoing scale of the visitor economy, whatever produced it: its share of output, employment, tax, and the supply chain it supports. Reported separately from impact. |
| Gross | A figure before counterfactual, displacement, and leakage are removed. The starting point for an attributable figure. |
| Gross value added (GVA) | The value an economy adds through its own activity: output less the inputs bought in. The measure of economic contribution Living Lab reports, calculated across 50 sectors on the OECD's ISIC Rev.4 classification. |
| Illustrative | A figure produced to show the shape of an output, not to measure any real place or engagement. Always labelled as such in the text, not only in a footnote. |
| Impact | The incremental, attributable change one bounded decision or event caused. Not the same as footprint, which is total scale. Treating one as the other is the most common way a public-value case gets challenged. |
| Input-output model | A model of how spending in one sector becomes demand in others: the hotel pays the laundry, the laundry pays the energy company. Living Lab's economic engine is an input-output model calibrated to the host economy rather than borrowed from a comparator. |
| ISIC Rev.4 | The United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification, fourth revision, which sorts economic activity into sectors so that figures can be compared across countries and years. The 50 sectors Living Lab models are ISIC Rev.4 sectors. |
| Leakage | Value that enters the local economy through visitor spend and then leaves it: through imported goods, commission to an overseas platform, profit repatriated by an external owner, or wages sent home by non-resident staff. Measured category by category, because an intervention aimed at the wrong channel wastes both money and political capital. |
| Leontief multipliers, Type I and Type II | Named for Wassily Leontief, who built the first input-output tables. Type I counts the direct and indirect effects of spending: the event and its suppliers. Type II adds the induced effect: what the suppliers' staff then spend. Both are stated, and both are calibrated to the economy in question. |
| Load factor | The share of an aircraft's seats that are sold. A route's usual headline measure, and a poor guide to whether the route is worth its incentive, because it says nothing about what the passengers did after landing. |
| MICE | Meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions: the business-events calendar. A full year of it, measured on one method, matched a World Cup on most measures and beat it on tax. |
| Model run | The specific, dated execution of a model that produced a figure, with its inputs and version recorded. Two model runs can differ; the record says why. |
| Multiplier | The ratio by which an initial spend becomes total economic activity once it has moved through the supply chain. Applied to an attributable figure, it gives a measurement. Applied to a gross total with no counterfactual, it gives a headline. |
| Natural experiment | A situation that arises on its own and that a researcher could not stage: a country losing visitors for policy reasons is handed the largest sporting event ever held on its soil. The 2026 World Cup was one. In that case, a mega-event did not fix a structural demand problem. |
| Observed, modelled, inferred | The three kinds of value in a Living Lab output, kept visibly separate. Observed is source data. Modelled is calculated from observed data on stated assumptions. Inferred is estimated from indirect signals. A reader decides what to treat as ground truth and what needs a sensitivity check. |
| Opportunity cost | What the venue, the security budget, and the public's attention could have done instead. Counted in every Living Lab figure. |
| Portfolio cannibalisation | Two events with strong standalone cases that draw on the same rooms, volunteers, sponsors, or audience in the same window, so the second adds far less than its bid promised. Visible only when a calendar is tested against itself. |
| Public value | The full return on a public intervention: fiscal return plus wider public outcomes, reported side by side. |
| Rate premium | The uplift in a hotel's room rate attributable to an event, measured per hotel with fixed effects against a counterfactual period. It varies from city to city for the same event. |
| Retention, retained value | The share of gross visitor spend that stays in the local economy after leakage. On an illustrative US$20bn visitor economy with 40% leakage, five points of retention is US$1bn a year, from the same visitors. The part of the visitor economy that is genuinely in a government's hands. |
| Room night | One room occupied for one night. The unit in which accommodation demand is counted, and the one most often overstated. A first published figure of 3.5m business-events room nights became about 1m once the travelling share was applied. Living Lab published the correction. |
| Sequencing | Pacing decisions so that capacity grows into demand: keys approved in the order demand will fill them, licences released as hotels open, events placed in the weeks where the calendar has room. Sequencing often lifts a visitor economy more than extra spend does. |
| Short-term rental (STR) | Accommodation let by the night outside the licensed hotel stock. Counted as part of total effective supply, because a market can look tight or loose depending on whether it is included. |
| Shoulder season | The weeks either side of the peak, when capacity is available and staff would otherwise be idle. A visitor added in the shoulder displaces less and leaks less than one added in the peak. The same event moved from August to May can be worth more to the country. |
| Signal137, Demand137 | Living Lab's two products. Signal137 measures what happened: attribution, retention, and reporting on demand. Demand137 tests what happens next: forecasting, scenarios, and optimisation. Both run on one method, so a route can sit beside an event beside a hotel and the difference reads as return, not as method. |
| Supported case | The scenario in which public co-investment is made: the route incentive, the hosting fee, the marketing programme. Compared against the base case and the downside case, net of displacement. |
| Travelling share | The proportion of an event's attendees who came from outside the metropolitan area and therefore needed a room. The adjustment that turns attendance into room nights. |
| Uncertainty range | See confidence. The range widens as an assumption becomes less certain, and a single-point forecast does not show that. |
| Visitor economy | Everything a visitor's spend touches: routes, hotels, events, venues, restaurants, transport, the supply chains behind them, and the tax on all of it. Close to a tenth of the world's output and employment. Living Lab's argument is that it is one system, and that it is still governed in pieces. |
| Wider public outcomes | Employment reach, community access, regeneration effect: real benefits of a public intervention that are not fiscal and often not monetisable. Reported beside the fiscal return, never converted into it by assumption. |
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.
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We turn messy event and tourism data into decisions that help communities grow. Bring curiosity and rigour. We will hand you questions nobody has answered yet.
