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This study aims to analyze the impact of event experience on event satisfaction and intentions to return and recommend the destination.

Relationships among constructs were tested on data gathered from 542 tourists during the America's Cup World Series held in South Italy in April 2013 by using a structural equation modeling approach. Moreover, a multigroup analysis was developed to test the possible moderator factors.

The results revealed that event experience and event satisfaction had positive impacts on the intentions to recommend and return to the host destination. Moreover, nationality, gender and trip motivation emerged as important moderating factors in the relationships among the latent constructs.

The findings of this paper enrich the existing literature and help tourism destination marketers and managers consider the triggering factors of a satisfying mega-sports event for the host destination and the marketing power of the on-site experience.

Practitioners should draw on the insights provided by this study to design destination strategies, particularly by paying attention to how an event experience causes an attendee to return to and recommend the host destination.

This study enriches the existing event literature in several ways. First, it emphasizes the importance of the event experience to the satisfaction level and willingness to return and recommend the host destination for a vacation, supporting the link between an event and its destination. Second, it provides a moderating analysis that offers new insights for marketing the event experience. It offers a multilevel model of mega-event tourism legacy, which opens up new avenues of research. Third, complementing the consumer-based analysis, this research includes the trend of visits (after 2013 to the present) to examine how a mega-sport event has brought about more postevent visits.