Fan Experience: CX Lessons for Hosting Major Events

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With the World Cup coming to New Jersey and the greater New York area in 2026, the time is now to create positive fan experience moments.  The 2026 Soccer World Cup final promises historic attendance. And the recent Paris Olympic Games and Paralympic Games inspire us to think about how to improve fan experience management and leverage CX best practices for experiences of the future.

The Importance of a Journey Mindset

Understanding fan experience is a journey and recognizing where that journey starts is the first step for fan effective experience management. The second is designing for every step of that journey, for everyone involved in the event. So that means your journey mindset extends from fans to local communities and service providers.

The Fan Experience Journey

So, where does the fan experience journey begin? The answer is not as obvious as it may seem. Did you know fan experience does not begin at the game itself? In fact, the game is the culmination of your fan experience.

For those who follow our articles, this idea is familiar. Just like travel, fan experience starts in the planning phase. And remember, the planning and packing stage of the travel journey is actually the moment at which travelers are happiest. And that happiness matters. In fact, it is quantifiable. Forrester finds “54% of customers who report positive emotions like feeling happy, valued, and appreciated are willing to forgive brands that make mistakes.” In high stakes events like the Olympic Games and Word Cup, brands will make mistakes. Fans will encounter friction along their journey.

How you design that journey mitigates that friction, and the consistent quality of experience and connection you offer across the journey fuels the happiness that empowers customers to forgive.

So, as we design journeys, we think about how to maintain and amplify that kind of happiness at each touchpoint. Admittedly, with fan experience, just as with travel, this gets more difficult as the journey grows more complex and uncontrollables mount. Weather, delays, and crowds threaten to bring down your fan’s happiness score. But they also present opportunities for customer recovery, memorable moments, and loyalty building.

Journey Mapping for Fans

To create that unified fan experience, you must design journey maps relevant to all personas who participate in and are affected by a major sporing event. That means you are journey mapping for multiple fan personas (regular attendees, once-in-a-lifetime visitors, fans with accessibility needs, large groups attending together). But you are also building journey maps for local residents and businesses whose day-to-day experience changes because of major sporting events. Like the fans, they also must be seen, cared for, and guided.

When you think about the design of the journeys, make sure you know where people are coming from. And what needs they have. This is not merely a thought exercise. It requires practical, on-the-ground analysis to uncover what is missing. And to determine what must be built to create frictionless fan experience.

That starts by engaging in an audit. The audit enables you to see what is missing along the journey, diagnose issues and challenges, and set the plan to address those issues and challenges. Here, you see customer-centered experience design in action. You are literally walking in the footsteps of your fan. Then planning and designing to fit their needs and enhance their experience.

Remember, when we talk about a fan experience journey, we are not limited to physical movement from Point A to Point B. You must also consider the communication journey. This is the critical journey within the journey. It covers how you determine what information your fan needs at what point, in what way. For instance, how are you communicating with your fans to add value and to guide them along their journey seamlessly and personally? Communication delivery can include websites, transportation system announcement boards and push notifications, signage (including street signs), and other channels.

Remember to integrate your communications journey across locations. From transportation systems to local points like hotels, restaurants and other local attractions, and your event venue.

Approach: How to Create Exceptional Fan Experience

In addition to journey mapping, exceptional fan experience requires training, technology, surveys, and activations. These link back to our recipe for hospitality-driven experiences fueled by people, process design, and technology. All key elements of customer experience. And all drivers of consistent, positive, and scalable fan experience.

Training

Hospitality training is essential to the successful delivery of fan experience. The hospitality mindset empowers employees and stakeholders at every level, operating at every stage of the journey, to give fans what they need. To make sure fans not only feel guided, and supported, but celebrated during this high-impact moment.

Hospitality training empowers everyone who encounters a fan at any stage on the journey to deliver on experience promises and solve discreet problems before they detract from the overall experience. Also, and importantly, it gives employees the skills to apply empathy to their interactions with fans. It helps them acknowledge and act upon the idea that, for many fans, an event like World Cup or the Olympic Games is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. An experience they have saved for, planned for, and sacrificed for. A well-trained hospitality team brings that knowledge into their communication and interactions with fans.

In talking about training, though, let’s not forget the volunteers that make up an essential part of overall fan experience. Not everyone involved in delivering fan experience is a paid employee of a venue or destination. Rather, we often rely on volunteers to support massive fan engagement efforts. So, when you are planning for your training, be sure to include the volunteers. This positions you to deliver a unified fan experience across a variety of delivery points.

Technology

Like communication, technology is a useful tool in improving fan experience and connecting with and empowering your fans along their journey. Think about how you can use technology to improve fan experience. The options are almost limitless. What technologies you choose and how you decide to deploy them should be aligned with your overall fan experience strategy, needs, and capabilities.

Augmented reality, facial recognition for entry, customized event apps that enable fans to manage everything from in-seat purchasing to accessing real-time updates like runner tracking tools that bring fans closer to athletes, are all options for host committees of major events to explore. What is most important, though, is the integration piece. Effective fan experience technology is infused across the journey, adds value to the fan, and deepens the connection between you and them.

As in all cases, technology for the sake of technology threatens to detract from the experience. But personalized technology that adds value and furthers connection improves the experience.

Surveys

Technology also can be deployed to help maintain continuous improvement of fan experience through customer surveys. No matter how you collect your data, though, surveys are helpful in communicating with fans that you value their perception of the experience, respect their needs and wants, and are committed to delivering exceptional experiences. Surveys also empower you to design experiences through the lens of the fan by learning from your fan’s lived experiences.

Over the years, we have seen clients who do not fully register the purpose of surveys and miss opportunities to learn from and leverage them. At the end of the day, surveys are an additional form of communication between you and your customer (between you and your fan). That means they create another layer of connection. This is an ideal moment to communicate to your fans that you value them and their unique perspectives. You are co-creators of the journey. Respect that relationship.

Surveying throughout the journey helps maintain fan communication and rearticulate your promises to them and your appreciation for them. Surveys at the end of the journey help you close the loop so you can hear and learn from fans. This end-of-journey touchpoint is especially important for events like World Cup or the Olympic Games, when tickets are sold the year (or years) before the event takes place. You have enough time to listen to early feedback and respond in your design. Then you have the opportunity to cement your relationship and fan loyalty at the end. Additionally, the survey data you receive at the end of the event shows you what worked and what didn’t after the considerable investment you made in fan experience. So you can leverage it for the future.

Activations

By now it is clear that mapping the journey of a fan and delivering experiences along that journey is arduous work. But we must remember, in all that work, this is entertainment experience. So, make it fun (and memorable) for your fans! This is where activations come in.

As you design macro and micro experiences along your fan journey, remember to create a festive experience, end to end. You are dealing with high emotions, excitement, and energy (the word fan comes from fanatic for good reason!). Remember, your fans are not merely coming to watch the game. They are coming for the experience of being PART of the game. And the game is a moment of celebration. It is the end of their journey.

So build that journey to the game and the experience at the game to match the emotional state of the fans. Whether their team wins or loses, we need to toast it. Create environments that offer this opportunity, that match and amplify fan energy. Honor the expense and the sacrifices many fans make to attend major sporting events. To buy a ticket and travel to a World Cup game, your fans are saying no to a lot of things so you can say yes to this. It is a bigger commitment than just showing up at the game on time. Honor the commitment your fans have made to you through activations that recognize them, celebrate them, and welcome them.

For help doing that, reach out to us. In our next article, we talk about the other essential piece of fan experience: local integrations. And how leaving out local communities in fan experience management is the equivalent of leaving out employees in customer experience management.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Liliana Petrova
Liliana Petrova CCXP pioneered a new customer-centric culture that energized more than 15,000 JetBlue employees. Future Travel Experience & Popular Science awarded her for her JFK Lobby redesign & facial recognition program. Committed to creating seamless experiences for customers and greater value for brands, she founded The Petrova Experience, an international customer experience consulting firm that helps brands improve CX. To elevate the industry, she launched a membership program to help CX professionals grow their careers. Ms Petrova lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

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