Rīga Boosts Event Advertising Budget to €800,000 for 2024

Although the municipal budget has not yet been adopted, Rīga plans to spend a total of 800,000 euros on events, which is half a million euros more than last year. There will be no such grand events in the capital this year as the European Basketball Championship, World Rally Championship stage or World Hockey Championship, which have attracted tens of thousands of tourists to Rīga in recent years, but the municipality expects that Rīga will be busier with visitors this year than last year. Rīga expects around 100,000 more tourists this year than last year. In total, up to 1.2 million guests, as stated by the Rīga Investment and Tourism Agency. If the city council supports it, the agency's budget will increase significantly this year, exceeding six million euros, more than half of which will be spent on marketing and advertising. "Currently, our priority is the Baltic States, Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and Poland. These are the countries where we are actively advertising, but we are also seeing a growing interest from Southern Europe, namely Italy, Spain, and Portugal. This is, of course, related to climate change – summers here are more pleasant than in Italy or Spain. We want to start advertising proactively in Southern Europe and invite tourists to Riga," said Fredis Bikovs, director of the Riga agency. This year, the agency plans to allocate €800,000 to organisers of contemporary art, theatre, music, cinema, and other cultural and entertainment events, "The support is for regular events that we, as a city, want to see every year. We're not talking about one-off events, such as Eurobasket 2025. We want to create a kind of event calendar. Ideally, the capital city would host some kind of international event that we organise ourselves in cooperation with the private sector," explained Bikovs. For example, the International Ballet Festival, the Rīga Opera Festival, and the Positivus music and culture festival, which attracts thousands of tourists every year, can apply for support. Its organiser, Ģirts Majors, said that he will also apply for municipal support this year. "The criticism so far has been more about the fact that the city council decides on certain individual events, but the organisers of other events feel that they are not being evaluated. Although I have not looked into the details of the programme, I understand that a unified, transparent system is being created so that there is no doubt that events have similar opportunities," said Majors. This year, the municipality will devote the most attention to Rīga's 825th birthday. A separate budget has been allocated for this. It is planned to spend 200,000 euros on advertising alone. The European Indoor Football Championship will begin in Riga this week, and other sporting events are also expected throughout the year. "We are trying very hard to enrich cultural and sporting life with various events, and we are really allocating funding for this. We can see the results – in 2024, 125,000 visitors attended the Rīga birthday festival, and in 2025, there were already 206,000 visitors. For example, Staro Rīga was visited by around 300,000 people last year. Events like these really shape city life," said Vilnis Ķirsis, Deputy Mayor responsible for culture, education and sports.