The tourism industry has started its professionalization process in Brazil in the early 90ths. Thereafter, the sector has been seeking an improvement on strategic planning, marketing and better structuring of specific locations in the country, in order to transform them into major tourist destinations. Rio de Janeiro city is seen as a reference destination, both for leisure and business tourism, and particularly due to the fact that it shall soon host great sports events, such as the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. However, there are only a few academic materials that focus tourism industry under strategic aspects. Accordingly, this work seeks to identify opportunities of social-economic development for Rio de Janeiro city arising from tourism industry, and particularly those enhanced through strategic alliances done by business event organizing companies, in the segment of tourism business. For such a purpose, it was sought to understand the role of these companies as main stakeholders in the tourism network of the destination. Moreover, the research used Global SNA Framework model (MACEDO-SOARES, 2011) to analyze the strategic group of companies and the events sector among the stakeholders of tourism industry, which has shown to be relevant for a better understanding of the area. The results there from disclosed the potential of these companies in the generation of opportunities to create new jobs to local population, mostly through alliances with professional entities, suppliers and governmental entities.