External and Internal Determinants Contributing to Event Participation and Destination Revisitation: A Sport Tourism Perspective

Abstract

Sport tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors in the tourism industry and is gaining burgeoning research interest from academia. However, there are limited studies combining sport and tourism research to understand sport tourists’ attitudes and decision-making related to an event-host destination. This PhD research addresses this gap by examining the formation and change of sport tourists’ destination attitudes in order to understand why sport tourists travel to a specific place to attend sport events and why they decide to return to this destination in the future as leisure vacationers. Specifically, the objectives of this research are threefold. Firstly, to identify and examine factors influencing sport tourist’s initial attitude formation towards a specific event-host destination, thereby understanding their initial travel decisions. Secondly, to assess how the actual visit experience of sport tourists contributes to their attitude change towards the destination. Thirdly, to reveal how the sport tourists’ post-visit destination attitude changes over time, thereby understanding the temporal effect of their future revisit decisions. Destination image (DI), a construct normally regarded as interchangeable with destination attitude, is adopted to operationalise the destination attitude of sport tourists because of its longstanding popularity in tourism research. Moreover, a tripartite attitudinal perspective was utilised to examine how the three components of DI (i.e., cognition, affect, and conation) change when the overall DI undergoes a change. The Psychological Continuum Model (PCM) provides the theoretical framework to guide this investigation. Combining the staged decision-making process model and the literature of DI formation and change with the hierarchical PCM provides the rationale for the conceptual model of this study.