For hosts

Year-round events for local places and accommodation

For people who live on hospitality and events in a place - places to stay, restaurants, towns and tourism organizations - we work so that events become a reason to visit in every season, not just the busy one.

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Beta in progress

Where we are

Play the Event is in beta. For places to stay, restaurants, towns and DMOs there is no dedicated feature today. We are gathering what you need.

Today

The site's public events map, the guides and the free tools on seasonality.

What we are building

Tools for hosts and public bodies, with no dates: we decide them with the people who will use them.

What we don't do

We do not sell bookings or packages, we do not connect to accommodation management systems and we do not estimate how many visitors will come.

What is already here

Play the Event Destination

Today Play the Event Destination includes the public events map, the guides and the free tools on seasonality built on official data; for tools dedicated to public bodies, we are gathering what you need.

  • The guides on seasonality

    What tourism seasonality is, how it is measured and what the figures say region by region.

    Start with the first guide

  • The glossary

    Arrivals, nights spent, length of stay and the Gini index explained in plain words.

    Open the glossary

  • Official figures with their source

    The figures on this page come from Eurostat: next to them you will find the table, the year and the date we read them.

Seasonality

Why all year round

A place does not live on one season alone. A food festival in autumn, a concert in winter, a gathering in spring are a reason to go somewhere when people usually stay home.

  • 31.2%Share of nights in July and AugustEuropean Union, 2025
  • 34.5%Share of nights in July and AugustItaly, 2024
  • 47.5%Share of nights in July and AugustPuglia, 2024

What the official figures say

In 2025, July and August accounted for 31.2% of the nights spent in tourist accommodation in the European Union. The seasonality Gini index, which is 0 when every month weighs the same and grows as nights concentrate in fewer months, was 0.249. In Italy in 2024, July and August accounted for 34.5% of nights; in Puglia, 47.5%.

Source: Eurostat, datasets tour_occ_nim (European Union and Italy) and tour_occ_nin2m (Puglia), all tourist accommodation; calculated by Play the Event on 1 October 2026 with the Eurostat method, which gives 0.25 for the European Union in 2025.

From 2025 Italian statistics also include private rentals that are not run as a business: Italian totals for 2025 cannot be compared with earlier years, which is why we use 2024 for Italy and Puglia.

Sources

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Read our mission

Who it is for

For hosts and for the people who bring a place to life

  • gathering interest

    Places to stay

    Local events are a reason to visit in the quieter months too: we want to work out with you how to use them.

  • gathering interest

    Restaurants

    A nearby event is a reason to eat out off-season too: we want to build it with you.

  • gathering interest

    Towns and DMOs

    We work so that every event brings life to places in every season, and we want to do it with the people who know them.

  • Associations and Pro Loco

    The local food festival, the town fair or the gathering your association puts on is what keeps a town alive all year.

All year round

Public events, all year round

A public event created by an association or an organizer appears on the site's events map.

Loading the public events.

To read

Guides on seasonality and local events

See all guides

Our method

How we work with places

When we show data about a place, any group with fewer than ten cases will be shown as "insufficient data", not as a number. Every official figure carries its source, year and the date we read it.

  • No figures below ten cases

    Any group with fewer than ten cases will be shown as "insufficient data", not as a number.

  • Every figure with its source

    Every official figure carries its source, year and the date we read it, with a link to the table.

  • No promised dates

    We decide the tools for hosts and public bodies with the people who will use them: that is why we give no dates.

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The other side

The other half of the story

Organizers make events happen, hosts need events: on Play the Event it is the same event.

For organizers