William (Bill) O’Toole is an international events development specialist. He recently returned from Saudi Arabia working with Deloitte assessing and advising the inaugural nationwide festivals and the development of the new event cities. From 2004 to 2015 he wrote and employed the Tourism Events Strategy for Saudi Arabia. Over the last three years, Bill has written, edited and contributed to six international textbooks and manuals on event management including: Events Feasibility and Development (for release in 2022), Risk Management for Events (2021), Crowd Management: Risk Security Health (2020), Event Crisis Management and Recovery (2021) and Dictionary of Event Studies, Event Management and Event Tourism(2021) .
Bill worked with event teams and Government tourism departments in many developing countries, such as Jordan, Sudan, Uganda, South Africa and Liberia for the United Nations consulting on the development of their events and festivals. His early consultancy with the Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) contributed to the stunning development of Dubai. All this work used his Events Sector Maturity Model to efficiently enable Governments to create, grow, evaluate and maximise the future benefit of their events sector. Bahrain and Qatar have used his services to train their new events sector. He currently teaches a Masters of Event Management in France and Australia and trains festival managers in the USA each year. In 2002 Bill originated the concept of the Event Management Body of Knowledge (EMBOK.org) that has become an international standard.
In 2018 in recognition of his work, Bill was inducted into the International Festival and Events Association Hall of Fame.
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