Cash registers ring in festival season.
| Auteur | Mirza, Faryal |
| Fonction | Money |
As the weather takes a turn for the better, the sound of music fills Switzerland, with a number of festivals kicking off in the summer months. Swiss News finds that for some regions, these events make even the local cash registers sing.
Switzerland is one big festival town during summer, with an impressive number of musical events taking place. Among the larger festivals or so-called 'top events' are the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Zurich Street Parade and the Lucerne Festival.
Silvia De Vito, spokeswoman for Switzerland Tourism, says the music festivals make the nation an attractive tourist destination. "For a small country like Switzerland, these festivals are very important," she says.
"We've noticed that when we're doing marketing abroad, combining tour packages with culture events is very successful," she adds.
Big bucks
And the festivals can bring big bucks to the regions in which they take place. Figures are few and far between but studies have explored the economic impact of at least two festivals in recent years.
The Street Parade, the Lucerne Festival and the Montreux Jazz Festival together are capable of generating economic benefits for their respective regions to the tune of nearly SFr 200 million. To put this figure into context, last year the Swiss chocolate industry rang up sales of SFr 1.36 billion.
This year's annual Montreux Jazz Festival on the banks of Lake Geneva takes place from July 1-16. One of the longest music festivals in Europe, it's an important source of revenue for the area. The total economic benefit for the region was put at SFr 30 million, says Michael Breiter, graduate assistant at Lausanne's University of Business Administration's Unit of Education and Research in Tourism.
"Visitors spend approximately SFr 14 million on the festival site," says Breiter. And that's not all--these visitors fork over an additional SFr 5.5 million in the region. Music-lovers clock an average of 44,500 overnight stays in the period.
"About SFr 6 million ... come from foreign visitors and represent a net inflow for the country," adds Breiter.
Making losses
Organisers of the Montreux Jazz Festival say the festival organisation makes little or no money. Press officer Dominique Saudan says the festival has been running at a loss for the last couple of years.
In 2004, the organisers lost SFr 500,000, something that Saudan blames on the bad weather, a scourge for any outdoor event given the number of open-air concerts. She adds that...
Pour continuer la lecture
SOLLICITEZ VOTRE ESSAICOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
