Why are college sports tourists traveling long distance? Antecedents of destination and team loyalty

Abstract

Purpose

On a home game weekend of collegiate football, thousands of fan visitors spend their weekend participating in college football games, showing significant potential of sports tourism businesses in the USA. Understanding the original personality of sport tourists and their travel motivation factors is imperative to develop appealing tourist attractions at the destinations of sports team fandoms. The purpose of the study is to examine the relationships among tourists' personality characteristics, their push and pulls motivations, satisfaction with travel experience, and loyalty toward destination and team using structural equation modeling.

Design/methodology/approach

The author collected information from a total of 301 sports tourists who had traveled to a college football game within the past year, staying at least one night in a hotel or other lodging place. This study employed PASW Statistics 25.0 and structural equation modeling using LISREL 9.30 for data analyses.

Findings

Personality has a significant relationship with push factors, especially for socialization motivation, and pull factors (i.e. access and affordability, other attractions) had more significant effects on sports tourists' satisfaction than push factors. The findings indicate the key roles for the entertainment motivation in generating tourists' satisfaction and destination loyalty and important roles of destination loyalty in building team loyalty.

Originality/value

The present study provides an approach of sports tourists' travel behaviors and experiences in the sporting event tourism. The outcome of this research can help both sports event organizers and destination marketers to understand the motivations for sports game attendance and to develop marketing strategies and products/services for attracting various types of sports tourists to games.

Citation

Min, J.H., Chang, H.J., Fowler, D. and Blum, S. (2023), "Why are college sports tourists traveling long distance? Antecedents of destination and team loyalty", Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Vol. 35 No. 2, pp. 323-343. https://doi.org/10.1108/APJML-05-2021-0371