The impact of sport tourism event image on destination image and intentions to travel: A structural equation modeling analysis

Hosting sport events has been a focus of destination marketers as a strategy to enhance its destination image and differentiate its tourism products. Communities are attracted to hosting sport events to draw marketing benefits that will contribute to the success of the destination in the long run by creating awareness, improving their image with visitors and attracting tourism business to generate future inbound travel. As such, destination images can be influenced by the hosting of a sport event and the attributes associated with this event. In other words, the event has a brand image for its participants and spectators. Research is scarce on event image perceptions held by sport event spectators and participants. Participants are the guaranteed "customers" of sport events and destinations that host them. Consequently, a theoretical framework that focuses on participants' psychological processes is needed to examine the factors that influence participants' intentions to revisit a destination to participate in leisure activities. For this purpose, this study utilized the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine the impact of event and destination images as attitudinal constructs, and the role of subjective norms and perceived behavioral control about event participation on intentions to revisit the destination to participate in leisure activities. The problem of this research was to examine the interrelationships between the concepts of sport tourism event image and destination image and their impacts on intentions to revisit a destination for leisure activities to test the TPB. Furthermore, this study developed a scale to measure a sport event's image to address this gap in the literature using Keller's (1993) theoretical framework of brand image associations. A model was proposed that tested eleven hypotheses. Independent variables included event image, destination image, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, past behavior with the event, and past behavior with the destination. The main dependent variable was intention to revisit the destination for leisure activities. The data were collected through focus groups and survey administration to a sample of 720 sport tourism event participants. Focus groups yielded six themes for the development of the sport tourism event image scale. Based on those themes a definition and a scale were developed. The model was tested utilizing structural equation modeling techniques. The results revealed destination image mediates the impact of sport tourism event image and past behavior (previous experience) with the destination on intention to revisit the destination for leisure activities. Event image had a significant large impact on the image of the destination. Implications for event and destination marketers include the practice of co-branding approaches with regard to brand images of event and destinations. Furthermore, the development of the sport tourism event image is a first step toward the development of an evaluation tool of sport tourism events' images from active sport tourists' (participants') perspectives. Future research should test the model and the scale proposed in this study with other populations of active sport tourists (e.g., runners, triathlon participants, basketball players) to further validate the findings. Finally, TPB should test whether intentions predict actual behavior in the field of tourism to validate the predictive power of the complete model.