Tourists’ experiences of mega-event cities: Rio’s olympic ‘double bubbles’

Abstract

Rio 2016 sought to connect Olympic-tourists with the city’s local-Cariocan community and culture. Yet the way mega-events are spatially and regulatorily organized, alongside the behavioural tendencies of Olympic-tourists, constrain such ambitions. Using Rio 2016 as a case-study, we offer in-depth, qualitative insights through the lens of 35 individual Olympic-tourists to examine how and why these factors determine behaviour, and thus experiences across host-environments. We detail how concerns over tourists’ safety result in managers designing risk averse experiences, produced by overlaying hyper-securitized and regulatory enforcements inside existing tourist bubbles, creating what we refer to as a ‘double bubble’ – reducing the likelihood of visitors venturing ‘off-the-beaten-track’. Whilst Olympic-bubbles protect tourists from outside threats, they restrict cultural engagement with the wider city, neighbourhoods and locals–side-lining other sides to Rio. We suggest managers adopt a dual-strategy of ‘local infusion’ in and ‘tourist diffusion’ beyond official zones to achieve intended goals.