Beyond the Arena: Transform Local Experience for World Class Events

Let’s get honest about local experience around major events. While it is exciting for the world to show up in your hometown for a major event like the World Cup or the Olympics, it often feels inconvenient and even burdensome to local residents. Visitors take up parking spaces. Event schedules disrupt traffic patterns. And the influx of tourists crowd cafes, convenience stores, and other stops on the daily journey of life.

Transportation designers, city planners, and host committees prepare for the influx of fans and tourists. They must also plan to design experiences for the needs, expectations and challenges of local residents and businesses. Local experience matters during regional and international events. And we can improve that experience – for residents and businesses – through local activations and integrations, and infrastructure and transportation improvements. With design that is informed by comprehensive data about local needs. And built through collaborative co-creation across all stakeholders.

What Happens When Communities Resent Visitors?

Before we get to those steps, let’s dive into the real effects of an influx of visitors on local communities. Whether for major sporting events or tourist seasons at popular destinations.

This summer, in Spain, local residents sprayed tourists with water and shouted “tourists go home.”? Local residents do not get to that point out of nowhere. It happens when event host committees, destination marketers, and individuals involved in city and infrastructure planning fail to account for local experience in the planning process.

So, how do we design and implement local experience journeys with a holistic view that takes into account the real people who live in sporting event and tourism destinations year-round? It starts by acknowledging that large-scale events disrupt the lives of local residents.

In the language of customer experience, we need to transform local detractors into fan experience promoters. That requires comprehensive customer research into the local experience. Customer research informs intentional design based on needs, opportunities, and cultures of local residents. All of that integrates into the planning process for the event.

Local Integration

Fan experience planners failing to consider local resident experience is the equivalent of leaving out employee experience in customer experience. We know good employee experience breeds good customer experience. So we must also know – and plan for – good local experience to fuel good fan experience.

One way we do that is by integrating local experience into the fan experience journey. Another is by leveraging major events like the World Cup or the Olympics to create customer experience programming. And initiate infrastructure improvements that have a lasting, positive impact on the communities that host events.

There are a number of ways to infuse and support local culture in the fan experience journey. These include highlighting local art and cultural experiences. They also include offering local food and beverage selections at event venues, airports, and train stations. All of these initiatives create a sense of place for the visitor. And economic opportunities and engagement opportunities for local residents, businesses, and artists.

Celebrating the unique local features of a place is only the start of improving local resident experience. Especially when fans are coming en masse for major events like the Olympic Games or World Cup. Creating economic engines is another.

Create Local Deals

Unlike the negative economic impact that some Majorca residents identified as the result of spikes in tourism, use event attendance (for international events like World Cup and regional events like the Jersey City Marathon), to drive local economic opportunities.

Build local deals with businesses that allow them to leverage the influx of people, money, and time spent in their space. Create economic and employment opportunities around the event to excite and reward local residents for contributing to fan experience. Come up with packages, offers, and discounts that introduce fans to local businesses and incentivize them to patronize them.

And collect feedback along the way! Always remember, as we say, feedback is a gift. Build in easy, interactive feedback collection into the process so local businesses can learn from new and existing customers. And offer local residents the opportunity to offer feedback about negative and positive impacts of the event on their interactions with local businesses.

Inform Local Businesses and Residents Early

Provide information about traffic and other disruptions ahead of time. As soon as you know how the event will impact infrastructure and daily life, inform the local communities who will feel that pain. Will roads be closed? How will the event affect parking?

Consider the volume you are expecting. Communicate clearly and consistently to the community. Give individuals and businesses time to make alternate plans. And empower them to communicate with their own customers and stakeholders about how to manage the inevitable disruptions large-scale events bring to day-to-day life.

As guidance here, allow me to share advice from the airline customer experience world: the bigger the disruption, the earlier you need to share.

We have spoken with New Jersey residents who say they are already planning to leave town during the games. This is a good thing about World Cup publishing its schedule two years out. Fans – and local residents – already know the agenda. Planning is power. And the more power you have, the less you are negatively affected by change.

For those who stay, you have time to keep them in the know, and to design infrastructure and experience improvements that will mitigate the negative impact of the event on daily life. And you have the opportunity to create Wow moments for local residents to feel excited about the event and proud to host and share their community with guests.

Offer Sponsorship Packages to Local Communities

We talked about the business opportunity of leveraging fan experience to drive customers to local businesses. Additionally, major sporting events should incentivize local residents to shop more, spend more time, and reap the benefits of these exciting moments in their home town. The more? you welcome and encourage members of the community to participate in the main event and ancillary events around the community, the more you get their buy-in and drive their spirit of hospitality.

When you design sponsorship packages, do not limit them to deals for athletes, their families, and friends. Create discounts and packages exclusively for local residents to make their experience better. These solutions can be simple: think of QR codes in the community with a link to a free coffee to take the sting out of losing their usual parking spot.

Keep in mind, we want to transform local communities into event promotors, not detractors. So, incentivize them to participate in and contribute to the enjoyment of the event.

Design Infrastructure Improvements for Long-Term Community Benefits

Major global events like the Olympics and the World Cup often serve as catalysts for transformative infrastructure projects. While the sporting events themselves are temporary, the infrastructure improvements they spur generate benefits for host cities, their communities, and their residents. Intentional design, based on a robust understanding of relevant local personas, logistical demands and the needs and wants of the city, are key to leveraging infrastructure improvements for sustained, positive community impact.

Of course, it does not stop at the design phase. That design must come to life through collaboration and co-creation on the part of all stakeholders. Looking at infrastructure through the lens of transportation improvements, for example. That includes local airports, regional railroads, local train and bus systems, highways, and roads. Clear communication across stakeholders and a shared responsibility to the needs and expectations of local communities, as well as event guests, paves the way for infrastructure improvements whose positive impact extends long after the game.

For the New York and New Jersey region, with the World Cup 2026 on the horizon, and for Los Angeles who is set to host the Summer Olympics in 2028, previous Olympic Games provide a standard for how infrastructure improvements initiated for the games make a lasting impact on cities and in local communities. The London 2012 Olympics saw the development of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It was designed intentionally to be a long-term asset to the community. Following the games, the park has emerged as a hub for recreation, housing, and cultural activities. All of this benefits local residents and nearby businesses. It aligned with urban renewal programs by creating much-needed housing in the London area, following the games. It also became an additional tourist attraction for future London visitors.

When Beijing hosted the Olympic games, the city focused on transportation improvements. The city expanded its subway system significantly to accommodate the influx of event visitors. In fact, Beijing continued to build upon its Olympic train system improvements, adding a new bullet train to the last section of what locals term the “Olympic railway,” in 2022. The new lines continue to serve millions of commuters daily, easing congestion and improving urban mobility.

Improve Transportation Infrastructure for More Accessible Communities

By prioritizing integration, community engagement, and sustainability, transportation infrastructure improvement projects transcend the immediate purpose of making travel to and from the game more convenient for fans and navigation around the event spaces less hectic for residents. They offer consistent value and improved quality of life to local communities into the future.

However, this ideal scenario only comes to life with cross-stakeholder collaboration and co-creation around an agreed upon, actionable strategy that identifies the experience needs of the community as centrally important. Collaboration enables integration with existing systems. Without that, sustainable transportation improvements are impossible. Host cities must design new infrastructure to complement and enhance established transportation networks to create seamless experiences across transportation modes. This approach maximizes efficiency for visitors during the event and creates long-lasting benefits for residents.

Community-centric planning is at the heart of sustainable transportation infrastructure improvements before, during, and after mega-events. By engaging local stakeholders early in the process, cities identify long-term needs and priorities that ensure infrastructure improvements meet the needs of the communities who will make use of them daily.

By embracing these principles, transportation hubs — from major airports to regional rail systems and local public transportation — can transform the momentum of major events into meaningful, lasting contributions to host cities and communities.

For more on maximizing local experience around regional and international events, schedule a call with us.

This article originally appeared on The Petrova Experience Blog.