Active Sport Tourists: Sport Event Image Considerations

Abstract

Sport events can be used as tourist attractions by destinations that seek to attract large numbers of tourists in their locale. This study examines the event image perceptions of active sport tourists (participants) of an international marathon event following the destination image measurement paradigm. The census of active sport tourists (N = 2,000) who traveled from abroad to participate in the event was used to elicit image associations about the event. Respondents were asked to indicate the three words that come to mind when they think of the event after they returned to their homes (posttrip phase). Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were utilized. For the qualitative approach, the acquired words (n = 1,015) were classified into six image themes (historical, emotional, organizational, physical, environmental, and social). The quantitative approach included a frequency analysis of prespecified key words associated with each dimension and revealed that the emotional theme was more frequently mentioned. These results suggest active sport tourists' event image perceptions are related to the themes above with emotional aspects being more dominant during the postevent recall of the event. More research is needed with different types of active sport tourists to be able to generalize these results.