42. Organizing an off-season event: a guide for associations and local committees

The committee meets in September, the summer festival has just ended, and someone asks: "What if we did something in November too?". The right questions follow at once. Will anyone come? Will hotels and restaurants be open? What if it rains? Who will help, now that the kids are back at school? This guide is for associations, neighbourhood committees, civic groups and local tourism associations in any country (in Italy, the Pro Loco) that want to organize an event outside the peak season and do it well: with data on their own area, a date chosen on purpose, services checked in advance, and an honest way of finding out afterwards how it went.

Why hold an event off-season?

The best reasons start with the people who live there, not with tourism numbers:

• Bringing life to quiet months. In many towns and neighbourhoods, chances to get together cluster in summer. An event in November or March is first of all for the people who live there.
• More choice of dates and places. Halls, squares, suppliers and performers often have more free dates outside the peak. It is not a rule, so ask case by case, but it is worth checking before you lock everything into summer.
• Fewer clashes. If every summer weekend already has its festival, off-season your event may have room. The reverse also happens: in some autumn weeks traditional festivals bunch together.
• A reason for hosts. For anyone running a hotel, a farm stay or a restaurant, the empty months are when a reason to visit helps most. The OECD notes that highly seasonal mountain and coastal destinations try to extend their season "for example through events and festivals" (OECD, Tourism Trends and Policies 2024); Canada, among others, aims to secure international events "as a four-season driver of travel" (same source).

What not to expect: that the event will fill hotels on its own. Part of the audience comes for the day from nearby and does not stay overnight; and even when nights go up, they may be nights moved from another period. We look at how to measure this further down.

Step 1. Understand your area's season with data

"Low season" means different things in different places. On the Mediterranean coast it is winter; in the Austrian Alps the busiest month of the year is February, because of snow, in five European regions (Eurostat, regional seasonality, 2024 data); in the Canary Islands there is hardly any difference between months (Gini of 0.040 in 2024, our calculation on Eurostat tour_occ_nin2m); in Japan the busiest month of 2024, August, accounted for 10.1% of nights and the weakest for 6.9% (Japan Tourism Agency). In the southern hemisphere the seasons are reversed. So start from data, not from a calendar that fits "everyone".

Where to find the data

• In the European Union: Eurostat table tour_occ_nin2m publishes nights spent month by month for every region.
• Elsewhere, or for your town or county: your national statistics office, tourism board or regional tourism observatory, where they publish monthly detail.
• If there are no official data: your own. Attendance at your past events, requests to the visitor office, nights at a friendly property willing to share them anonymously.

A worked example: classifying the months

A practical rule, stated as such because there is no official threshold: peak season is the months above the monthly average; low season the weakest months; shoulder the months below average but not among the weakest, next to the peak. With 2024 data for Apulia, in southern Italy (nights spent in all accommodation, Eurostat tour_occ_nin2m), the monthly average is 1,491,197 nights:

Month	Nights 2024	Compared with average	Class
January	244,814	16%	low
February	266,459	18%	low
March	412,096	28%	low
April	742,949	50%	shoulder
May	1,208,153	81%	shoulder
June	2,364,973	159%	peak
July	3,813,220	256%	peak
August	4,686,703	314%	peak
September	2,275,318	153%	peak
October	1,075,117	72%	shoulder
November	431,729	29%	low
December	372,830	25%	low

Reading: in Apulia, April, May and October are shoulder months, with much of the accommodation still open; from November to March the area is far emptier. A local committee that wants as many services open as possible will look at May or October; one that wants to liven up the village in winter will choose December or February, knowing it must check everything more carefully. Run the same exercise with your own region's data: in a ski area the shoulder months will be different. If you work with your own figures, the seasonal trend analyzer finds the peak month and the weakest month in your twelve values, and the seasonality thermometer for an Italian province shows the same reading month by month for an Italian province, with ISTAT data.

Who travels when

Residents and international visitors can keep different calendars. In Italy residents peak in August and international visitors in July, and in June to September 2025 international visitors accounted for 54.7% of nights (ISTAT, Q3 2025, in Italian). In Croatia in 2025, 69% of international nights fell in the third quarter, against 23% for Croatian residents (Eurostat). Before deciding who the event is for, look at which audience is already around in that month.

Step 2. Choose the date

There is no right date in the abstract: there is the date that best fits your event's constraints. Here are the criteria to check, and where to find the information.

Criterion	Question	Where to look
Typical climate	What temperature and how much rain are usual in that month?	The 1991-2020 climate normals from your national weather service: 30-year averages, not forecasts (World Meteorological Organization)
Daylight	When does it get dark? Does the outdoor programme fit?	Your country's official sunrise and sunset tables
Holidays	Is it a long weekend? Are families away or at home?	The official calendar of national and local public holidays, including religious festivals of the communities in your area
Schools	Are there school holidays that week?	The school calendar for your region or district
Other events	Is there already a festival, a fair or a big match nearby that day?	Event calendars of your local authority and region, websites of nearby towns, word of mouth from other associations
Open services	Hotels, restaurants, cafés, toilets, public transport: who will be open?	A phone call or a visit: seasonal closures are so normal that European statistics calculate occupancy "net of seasonal closures" (Eurostat)
Volunteers	Who in the group is free that day and the days before?	A poll with three or four candidate dates

Example: comparing three candidate dates

An association in a hill village wants a new-olive-oil festival. It has three possible dates (an invented example, to show the method):

Criterion	Third Saturday of October	Second Saturday of November	First Saturday of December
Produce	harvest just started, little new oil	new oil available	new oil available
Typical climate	milder	rainier	colder
Daylight	good until late afternoon	dark early	dark early
Other events nearby	festival in the next village	none	Christmas markets
Open accommodation	all	two farm stays out of three	one out of three
Volunteers available (poll)	9 of 14	12 of 14	7 of 14

The second Saturday of November wins on produce, competition and volunteers, but needs a rain plan and a schedule that ends in daylight or under cover. It is a reasoned choice, not a number, and that is the right way to decide, because each criterion weighs differently for each event.

Step 3. Check beds, food and transport

Off-season, the most frequent mistake is assuming services will be there. A simple calculation tells you how much to ask for.

Worked example (invented figures, replace them with yours): you expect 400 participants; from past years you know that about 30% travel more than an hour and might stay overnight. That is 120 people. If on average two people share a room, you need about 60 rooms for one night. Now call the properties in the area: if 35 are open that weekend, you have three options: widen the area (properties up to twenty minutes away), keep the programme to a single day so people from further away can go home, or agree with some properties that they stay open that weekend. The same calculation applies to meals: 400 people at lunch in a village where only one restaurant opens in winter need a food stand or an agreement with whoever cooks.

Check transport too: winter timetables for buses, local trains and ferries are often reduced compared with summer. If the event depends on one connection, check it on the right season's timetable.

Step 4. Plan backwards

Once the date is set, build the work calendar from the end. A sample schedule for a medium-sized public event, to adapt to the rules of your country:

When	What
16 weeks before	Date decided, venue booked, one person in charge of each area (permits, food, programme, communication, volunteers)
12-14 weeks before	Permit applications to the local authority and other bodies: timings and documents vary by country, so ask your council's events office straight away
10 weeks before	Supplier quotes, agreements with accommodation and restaurants, bad-weather plan
8 weeks before	Public announcement, first registrations or bookings if needed
4 weeks before	Volunteer rota, safety plan, insurance checked
1 week before	Final confirmations, short-range weather forecast, decision on plan B
After the event	Accounts closed, thank-yous, data gathered to see how it went

Rules on permits, safety, food and music are national and local. For Italy there are our guides to permits for a village food festival and music and copyright; elsewhere, your local council's events office is the first point of contact. No guide replaces the advice of whoever issues the permit.

Step 5. The bad-weather plan

Off-season, weather is the biggest variable. Climate normals tell you what is likely in a month, not what will happen on the day (WMO). Prepare in advance:

• an indoor alternative, already booked or with a written agreement;
• a decision rule (for example: if three days before the official weather service issues a warning above a given level, move indoors) and who decides;
• a way to tell everyone within hours: the list of people who confirmed and the association's channels;
• which costs cannot be recovered if you postpone (deposits, printing) and which can be moved.

Step 6. Work with hosts

An off-season event works better when hosts know about it in time. Some concrete ideas:

• tell hotels, farm stays, bed and breakfasts and restaurants in the area as soon as the date is certain, so they can decide whether to stay open;
• ask whether they would offer their own menu or package for those days: they decide and sell it, the association just spreads the word;
• involve the visitor office or local tourism body, which often keeps an events calendar;
• in Italy, the local Pro Loco is often the meeting point between associations, the council and businesses: UNPLI, the national union of Pro Loco, reports a network of 6,350 of them (UNPLI, in Italian). Many countries have similar local tourism or festival associations.

Step 7. Find out afterwards how it went

This is where the association earns credibility with the council and with hosts. Three rules:

1. Count what you can count. Participants (registrations, replies to invitations, free tickets collected, an honest estimate for open areas), volunteers involved, costs and income.
2. Ask little, and anonymously. If you want to know where people came from, one optional question ("less than an hour away", "further", "I stayed overnight nearby") is enough and does not collect personal data you do not need.
3. Do not credit the event with what you cannot show. If local properties say they had more guests, compare with the same weekend last year and with a weekend without the event. Even then it is a clue, not proof. Remember that accommodation statistics only see people who sleep there: day visitors are same-day visitors and do not appear (UN International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics, paragraph 2.13).

The most common mistakes

1. Copying the summer festival into November, with the same outdoor programme until midnight.
2. Finding out the week before that the only restaurant in the village is closed for holidays.
3. Setting the date without asking volunteers, who off-season have work, school and other commitments.
4. Promising the council or sponsors "extra tourists" with no way of measuring it.
5. Ignoring other events: in some areas, autumn harvest festivals cluster on the same weekends.
6. No rain plan, or a plan B that nobody knows who should trigger.

What we do not know

• Whether a single off-season event increases nights spent in a place: it depends on the place, the audience and the event, and there is no reliable general measure.
• Which dates are "best" in absolute terms: the criteria weigh differently for a village fair, a festival or a sports gathering.
• Permit timings in your area: they vary from country to country and from council to council.

Further reading: what tourism seasonality is and how to measure it, Italy as a national case compared with Europe and the glossary.

Sources

All sources were consulted on 1 October 2026. Calculations on Eurostat and Japan Tourism Agency data are by the Play the Event editorial team, using the method described in the text.

1. OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2024 - OECD, 2024. Consulted on 1 October 2026.
2. Seasonality in the tourist accommodation sector - Eurostat, Statistics Explained, 2026 (data extracted May 2026). Consulted on 1 October 2026.
3. Tourism statistics - seasonality at regional level - Eurostat, Statistics Explained, 2025 (2024 data, extracted November 2025). Consulted on 1 October 2026.
4. Nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments by month and NUTS 2 region (tour_occ_nin2m) - Eurostat, updated 22 September 2026. Consulted on 1 October 2026.
5. Glossary: Net occupancy rate - Eurostat, Statistics Explained, consulted 2026. Consulted on 1 October 2026.
6. 宿泊旅行統計調査 (2024年・年間値（確定値）) - Overnight Travel Statistics Survey, 2024 annual confirmed values - Japan Tourism Agency (観光庁), 2025 (27 June). Consulted on 1 October 2026.
7. Flussi turistici - III trimestre 2025 - ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics), 2025 (3 December). Consulted on 1 October 2026.
8. Updated 30-year reference period reflects changing climate - World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 2021 (5 May). Consulted on 1 October 2026.
9. Dalle Pro Loco all'UNPLI - UNPLI - Unione Nazionale Pro Loco d'Italia, consulted 2026. Consulted on 1 October 2026.
10. International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics 2008 - United Nations and UN Tourism (UNWTO), 2010. Consulted on 1 October 2026.