Coping with unforeseen contingencies in event management: an analysis of hosts’ perception.

Gatherings and cultural events may face cancellations, postponements, or adjustments due to differentunforeseen contingencies. Organizers must swiftly identify solutions, yet there is limited understandingof how hosts perceive changes in the value proposition. To address this, we collected data at the 2020and 2021 La Notte della Taranta, a prominent European folk music festival that was partially canceledin 2020 and adapted in 2021. Consistently, this research focuses on Covid-19 pandemic as unforeseencontingencies to examine of generic behavioral traits and festival-specific features in determining hosts’attitudes. We focus on two aspects: agreement with organizers’ measures in 2020 and 2021, and theperception of tourists’ behavior in the last regular edition in 2019. Findings emphasize the objectiveCovid-19 danger, with preferences for ambiguity consistently influencing both research questions. Thisunderscores the relevance of considering generic behavioral traits when making extraordinary organiza-tional decisions.