Transformations  in
Business & Economics

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPORT EVENTS AND DESTINATION IMAGE: SOME THEORETICAL APPROACHES
Rimantas Mikalauskas, Herbert Strunz, Galal Mohamed Hamza Afifi

ABSTRACT.Current literature on sport events and tourist destinations is still largely in its infancy, where the majority of studies still have not been conducted in investigating and documenting the role and impact of tourists' involvement and emotions on sport events. Furthermore, tourist destination image is defined as the sum of beliefs, ideas and impressions a tourist has on a certain destination. For these reasons, sport tourists cannot take future decisions in sport events without a prior evaluation of how the emotions, involvement and image of tourist destinations will influence their decision.

The paper emphasizes the impact of globalization which itself progressively diminishes and resolves the potential and real borders and barriers, makes influence on understanding of destination and involvement. The concept of destination involvement describes different attitudes a tourist can have towards a destination: from a limited involvement qualified as awareness, to deeper types of involvement, indicated as attraction, attachment and, finally, allegiance explaining about the relation between sport events and destination image and taking into account various stages of understanding the tourist involvement process. The theoretical analysis suggests that a branding extension approach could be a feasible strategy to strengthen the image of sport events. Other two approaches, i.e. co branding and brand feature approach have been proposed in literature on the basis of the distinctiveness of sporting event brand and destination brand.

KEYWORDS: sport events, globalization, concept of destination, image, destination image, involvement.

JEL classification: D23, D71, D73, Z13.