Tourist Loyalty In Sport Event Tourism: The Case of Mallorca 312

Abstract

[eng] Retaining tourists and reinforcing tourist loyalty is critical for sport event marketing researchers and practitioners. This paper explores the factors that increase sport event tourist loyalty and investigates the relationships between motivation, experience quality, satisfaction, and loyalty in the case of Mallorca 312 cycling tour, one of the biggest and most popular cycling events in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Mediterranean. The results show satisfaction is the key determinant for the loyalty of sport event tourist. Also, experience quality has directly influence on the loyalty, and particularly on intention of saying positive things and encouraging others to attend. While motivation has no direct effect on loyalty but directly influences experience quality, which is identified to have two dimensions event experience quality and interaction experience quality in this study. Moreover, event managers in sport tourism might utilize these findings as well as marketing and product design implications to manage tourist loyalty.