WRC gets a lot of money from Sardinia. The event is backed by the Sardinian tourism authority with almost 1 million euro, plus 200k euros from Alghero City council and about the same money by Alghero's tourism authority. If we consider the private sponsors, you can peek also Qatar's hotels (Smeralda Holding) and you can easily understand why Sardinia can't be actually touched. Don't forget that Italian ASN's President is Angelo Sticchi Damiani, a man that has a great lobby power within the FIA. All that said to underline how Sardinia is strongly backed both on a commercial and sporting pov.

Regarding the event itself, moving the Service Park to Alghero brought a lot of people and tourists to the service park, which was a complaint from the teams in the years back in Olbia. Another "past issue" was the ferry boat cost, which is now 100% free of charge for all the teams and the spectators got advantage of it with the discounts offered by the sponsor (Grimaldi Lines) both from Genoa, Livorno and Barcelona. And Alghero-Olbia are 2 airports with plenty of EasyJet-Ryanair low-cost flights.

Generally Sardinia is a powerhouse in getting worldwide events: other than WRC they got Extreme E, Motocross MXGP, F1H2O and the Aquabike world cup.