TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES

Feast or famine: asymmetric links between events and restaurant revenue

Abstract

Planned events are often expected to coincide with higher hospitality consumption, yet aggregate evaluations can obscure how event-related revenue is distributed across businesses and space. This study examines associations between planned events and observed restaurant revenue across event types, restaurant formats, and spatial contexts. We integrate SafeGraph restaurant revenue, PredictHQ event records, and PRISM weather data to ­construct a daily establishment-level panel of Texas restaurants from 2019 to 2022. High-dimensional fixed-effects models show a positive average association between planned events and restaurant revenue, although the estimate attenuates substantially under more demanding restaurant-specific temporal fixed effects. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity across event and restaurant types. Business events are associated with broad positive revenue patterns across restaurant categories. In contrast, sports and festive events exhibit a feast-or-famine pattern, with positive associations for full-service restaurants but negative associations for limited-service restaurants. Supplementary analyses further indicate that event-related revenue associations can extend beyond the focal zip code, although spatial inference remains limited. By conceptualizing planned events as event bubbles associated with uneven revenue geographies, the study advances event-impact research beyond aggregate economic evaluation toward spatially and sectorally differentiated hospitality outcomes.

Keywords

Event bubble; event impact; restaurant revenue; big data analytics; geospatial analytics; Texas

Research topic

AI and Big Data, Tourist Flows and Location

Research method

Econometrics, Spatial Modeling, Big Data

Geographic area

US

Additional links for this paper

ResearchGate

Publisher Website

Web of Science

HOW TO CITE

Hwang, G. (Kevin), & Yang, Y. (2026). Feast or famine: asymmetric links between events and restaurant revenue. Tourism Geographies, . https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2026.2733832

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