Why We Can Compare the Bezos Wedding to the Super Bowl

Venice just hosted a three-day wedding extravaganza that could give the city’s economy a $1.1 billion boost from “media visibility” and direct and indirect spending.

Yes? Not necessarily.

Bezos Wedding Spending

With what could be a $50 million price tag, the Bezos-Sánchez welcome party was on Thursday, the ceremony on Friday, and the reception, yesterday.

It all began at a Renaissance-era church with a dinner at the Diller-Furstenberg home. The next day, they gathered at an island where Matteus Bocelli performed and then, on Saturday, the reception was at a former shipyard. Meanwhile, many of the 200-250 guests stayed at local luxury hotels. Booked, rooms were going for 4,000 euros a night. Dolce & Gabbana and Versace provided some of the wedding party’s attire. Among the merchants that got paid, we could name the pastry chefs, the glass blowers, the water taxis. Guests arrived on yachts, helicopters, and private jets. In addition, millions in charitable donations went to a group that studies the lagoon ecosystem, UNESCO, and Venice International University.

Also, the pre-wedding foam party was on the Bezos yacht. The pictures indicate a foam party is just a yacht and guests covered in soap bubbles:

I could continue with the spending but you get the picture. Also, the media was not entirely positive about all they described.

I do wonder though if Venice charged its €5 tourism fee (that recently went up to €10 for last-minute bookings).

Our Bottom Line: Big Event Economics

Deciding if Venice will get the economic boost it expects, we can ask a sports economist.

Referring to the World Series, they say that it would be “negligible.” Yes, the home city enjoys a surge in demand for hotel rooms, restaurant meals, souvenirs, and even dry cleaning.

But in his “reality check” paper on mega sports event spending, economist Victor Matheson concludes that cities hosting World Series games had little or no expenditure increases from 1972-2000. The reason is shifting and departing dollars. The shifts relate to the normal spending that is replaced by World Series or Super Bowl money. The revenue from local citizens avoiding congested areas was replaced by tourists. In San Francisco’s hotels, Super Bowl visitors just replaced the city’s normal tourist traffic while the dollars spent at a national chain traveled to their home office. And, like Venice, they certainly had a massive but temporary increase in police spending.

Because even the long term legacy effects are usually minimal, the host cities wind up with a burdensome current and future cost.

Returning to where we began, that massive economic boost from the wedding might become just a slight bounce.

My sources and more: Today, we looked at a slew of articles. They included Reuters, the AP,  WSJ, the NY Times and CNN.  Meanwhile Business Insider and econlife had more of our facts.

Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.