Abstract
Large-scale sport events help attract a wide range of attendees, resulting in various implications for the host community. This paper is concerned with understanding the legacy of the 13th EHF European Handball Championship, held in Croatia in January 2018, by assessing the event’s economic and social benefits and costs. Drawing on the Social Exchange Theory, it also examines if any significant differences exist between host city residents and non-host city residents regarding their perceived impacts of this event on the host cities. The number of impacts was reduced by Exploratory Factor Analysis. Differences between host city and non-host city residents were examined by an independent samples t-test. The results suggest that community development and pride, security risks, traffic problems, economic benefits, environmental concerns, and economic costs are the main impact dimensions. Non-host city residents expressed a higher level of agreement with most of the impacts, but significant differences exist primarily within the dimensions of community development and pride, economic benefits, traffic problems, and environmental concerns. These findings could benefit event planners and sport marketers when trying to acquire community-wide support and to better understand how residents perceive both the positive and negative impacts that events generate.
Highlights
Sport tourism is an important part of the tourism industry and exists under a variety of forms and names
The results suggest that community development and pride, security risks, traffic problems, economic benefits, environmental concerns, and economic costs are the main impact dimensions
Factor analysis resulted in 23 items under six factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 (Table 3): factor 1—Community development and pride, factor 2—Security risks, factor 3—Traffic problems, factor 4—Economic benefits, factor 5—Environmental concerns, and factor 6—Economic costs
Summary
Sport tourism is an important part of the tourism industry and exists under a variety of forms and names. At the forefront are sport events, and event sports tourism as referred to by Bull 2009), or sport-event tourism as referred to by Alexandris and Kaplanidou (2014) and Involvement in any organized sport can generate planned events (Getz 2008), as well as event-related travel (Getz and Patterson 2013). Such events usually gather both active (i.e., competitors and officials) and passive (i.e., spectators) participants, albeit some sports and events are more attractive to spectators than others (Gozalova et al 2014; Roche et al 2013; Weed and Bull 2009). The synergic effects of hosting sport events and tourism development, such as increased tourism figures, addressing seasonal fluctuations, new employment, increased income generation, and tax revenue from expenses, have been analyzed quite often in previous studies (Daniels et al 2004; Duglio and Beltramo 2017; Higham 2005; Khodr 2012; Li and Jago 2013; Meurer and Lins 2018; O’Brien 2007; Schnitzer et al 2017; Solberg and Preuss 2007)
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