How Cities Use Entertainment to Draw Tourists in 2025
Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan.
Tourism has returned to full strength in 2025, and with international arrivals back at pre-pandemic levels cities once again competing for attention across the globe. We see this competition not only in the usual charms of food, culture, and heritage, but increasingly in entertainment designed to keep visitors excited and spending.
The entertainment now ranges from massive festivals to theatres, sports arenas, and even online platforms. We are also witnessing how the digital side of tourism is taking form, with simple illustrations like a list of new CA casinos pointing to places that offer exclusivity, originality and inventive touches - precisely the qualities cities themselves work hard to show through their attractions. All these developments and trends set the stage for a closer look at how cities worldwide are using entertainment to attract travellers.
Festivals That Pull Global Crowds
Few strategies match the scale of cultural festivals when it comes to sheer visibility. Set to welcome close to 28 million visitors over half a year, Expo 2025 in Osaka has been prepared as a showcase where an entire city becomes the stage for culture, technology, and design. The magnitude of such events transforms the host into a global gathering point, creating months of sustained attention.
Other cities are pursuing similar spectacles. Riyadh’s annual entertainment season, launched only a few years ago, surpassed 16 million visitors by January 2025. The programme of concerts, sports exhibitions, and immersive art installations has rapidly repositioned the Saudi capital as a cultural hub in its own right. For visitors, the effect is simple: there is always something happening, and it is designed to surprise.
At a smaller but no less impactful level, Calgary turns to its own major festival, the Stampede, which drew 1.47 million people in 2025. While not so dominant in scale, the Stampede still demonstrates how a single event can anchor a city’s global image. The lesson is that a city can project influence far beyond its borders when it turns a local celebration into a shared experience.
Sports Venues as Tourism Engines
Cities have also found that sports infrastructure doubles as a magnet for visitors well beyond match day. In Las Vegas, Allegiant Stadium has now welcomed more than six million attendees since it opened in 2021, with nearly half a million visiting in the second quarter of 2025 alone. Apart from football, the stadium hosts concerts and international events which ensures a steady inflow of fans who spend not just on tickets but on hotels, dining, and local attractions.
In many other cities, new venues are constructed with the intention to place the host city in the spotlight. They host tournaments and global events that turn into reference points, where the result is remembered together with the name of the city. A decisive match or a famous concert leaves a trace that binds the location to the memory of the occasion.
Calgary’s recent expansion of the BMO Centre, combined with its hosting of the 2025 Rotary International Convention, illustrates a different route to the same goal. More than 15,000 delegates from over 120 countries came to the city at the same time, showing how careful planning and a well-prepared venue can give a city the ability to welcome the world with authority.
Theatre and the Arts as Long-Term Draws
Theatre complements festivals and sport by giving cities continuity of audience, sustaining visitor interest from one month to the next. London’s West End, for example, has become a cultural and economic powerhouse as it welcomed more than 17.1 million theatregoers in 2024 - an audience that even surpassed the Premier League by 2.5 million.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Broadway closed its 2024–25 season with nearly 15 million attendances and close to $2 billion in box office gross. These numbers reveal how performing arts are more than cultural enrichment: they are a consistent economic driver that ensures tourists always have a reason to return.
The model has taken root in many places, but Edinburgh stands out, with its summer festivals drawing millions and giving the city a reputation as an arts capital. The pattern is clear: when cities nurture theatre and festivals over time, they create traditions that fuse with local identity. Visitors return not only for the performances but for the certainty that the curtain will rise again the following season.
Gaming and Entertainment Spend
Casinos, gaming districts, and integrated resorts illustrate another side of tourism strategy, one built around concentrated entertainment spending. World’s casino capital, Macau, recorded gambling revenue of $2.73 billion in July 2025 - almost one-fifth higher than the same month a year earlier - a steep climb that reflects how strongly visitors feel about coming back to the city and pouring money back into it
In the same year, Singapore’s tourism receipts showed a 25 percent rise in the sightseeing, entertainment, and gaming category, underlining how tightly woven gambling is with food, shopping, and hospitality.
These destinations prove that gaming does not stand alone: casinos act as gateways to a wider visitor economy. Travellers drawn by gaming often extend their stay to attend shows, dine, and shop, creating multiplier effects that ripple through the city. In effect, these integrated resorts in Asia function as cities within the city, drawing travellers into a contained world where every hour and every diversion is already accounted for.
Canada has begun to trace its own version of this story through digital markets. Ontario reported CA$3.2 billion in online gambling revenue in 2025, showing that entertainment can generate billions without a physical venue. The rise of these platforms shows how tourism stretches further than the street outside a hotel: a traveller may spend the morning in a casino and the evening at a live dealer’s table online, and the cities that master both worlds will be the ones remembered.