An exploratory study of infrastructure issues impacting the outcomes of live events and the affect this has on event attendee personal experience: a case study of T in the Park 2015, at Strathallan Estate, Perthshire.

Abstract

In 2015, the popular Scottish outdoor summer music festival, T in the Park, moved away from its venue at Balado Airfield, Kinross, to its new site at Strathallan Estate, Perthshire. Throughout the three day event, organisers and attendees faced a number of issues, several involving infrastructural elements of the festival's new venue. A gap in existing literature was found, with no previous research or studies being conducted surrounding the influence event infrastructure issues can have on attendee personal experience at live events, such as T in the Park. A quantitative research approach was chosen, with the use of online questionnaires. This was felt to be an appropriate data collection method as it reached out to a high volume of people and would allow for a sufficient number of responses to be analysed. The aim of this research is to identify the infrastructural issues festival attendees experienced throughout the whole event, and if this impacted their personal experience negatively or positively. From that, it will also be investigated whether this might influence attendee re-attendance of the event in future years. From the research, it was identified that the three main thematic areas of the research; transport, camp site and main site; all suffered from infrastructural issues, which did influence the likelihood of a number of attendees to return to the event again. However, opinions varied from attendee to attendee. Some of those participants who identified a variety of issues in these three areas of the event, did state that these problems did not influence and affect their personal experience of the festival at all.