Investigating Visitors' Perceptions and Behaviors in a Crowded Situation at a Large-Scale Exhibition

Understanding how visitors respond to crowding is crucial for ensuring the success, safety, and overall enjoyment of large-scale exhibitions. However, despite its significance, limited research has explored this issue. To address this gap, we conducted a questionnaire survey in 2022 and 2023 for visitors to exhibitions held search aims to explore the level of consistency between perceived and actual crowding, levels of discomfort in crowded situations, tolerance levels for crowding, and behaviors to avoid crowded situations. The results revealed significant changes in visitor perceptions across the two-year period. Notably, the acceptable crowd density in 2023 increased by 13% compared to 2022. This change in level of tolerance for crowding might have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic and other contextual factors that altered visitors' percepceptual changes, behaviors to avoid crowded situations remained consistent across both years. The most comthe context of large-scale exhibitions are not uniform. exhibitions.