The “Pink Night” festival revisited: Meta-events and the role of destination partnerships in staging event tourism

•We revisit an original case of the “Pink Night” festival (Giovanardiet al., 2014).•We examine how and why competing DMOs collaborate to develop event tourism.•We introduce, describe and illustrate the brand-new concept of meta-event.•We relate meta-events to the events portfolio model.•Meta-events are brand architecture tools to rebrand/reposition wide tourism areas. This paper adopts a managerial perspective to revisit an original case study of the “Pink Night” festival presented by Giovanardi et al. (2014) in an earlier issue of this journal. Our in-depth qualitative study contributes to the event tourism planning and management literature in three ways. First, we shed light on how and why competing Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) cooperate to plan, develop and manage event tourism. Second, we introduce and describe the brand new concept of the meta-event, which is the main theoretical contribution of this work. Third, we elucidate the role of meta-events as brand architecture tools to rebrand and reposition wide tourism areas. We illustrate the theoretical and managerial implications of the meta-event concept for event tourism studies and destination managers.