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In today's complex business environment, creating and delivering value to the customer, as the ultimate goal of business models, implies continuous research of elements and relationships within the business model. Despite the growing level of quality research in the field of business models, there seems to be a remarkable gap in the topic of tourism, especially in sport tourism. Being a unique combination of an experience-oriented activity (i.e. tourism) and a performance-oriented activity (i.e. sport), sport tourism presents many challenges to service providers. In fostering sustainable and profitable sport tourism, it is reasonable to ask how complex challenges affect business models and whether new model definitions and elements should be propounded. The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual business model for sport tourism that will consider some critical issues that challenge the industry. First, a range of contrasting perspectives regarding business model elements will be analysed. Second, three potentially significant issues for sport tourism operators-tourist experience, safety and security, and the importance of the environment-will be analysed, and their position within the context of the business model will be discussed. Finally, a new conceptual business model framework for sport tourism will be proposed. This framework would facilitate research into the managerial aspects of sport tourism supply to provide additional guidelines for practitioners, particularly for small, private-owned businesses.

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The connection between tourism development and the natural environment is more intense in outdoor sport tourism than in many other forms of tourism. Natural settings (space), sport activities undertaken and the motivations of the people who participate in them interact to create sport tourism experiences. Tourist safety and security are also proved to be important elements of a tourist experience and it seems that sport tourists may be more sensitive to safety issues than non-sport tourists. This paper therefore aims to analyse the importance of the natural environment and safety and security issues, as constitute event business model elements, in providing sport tourism experiences. The natural setting is also examined as a motivation to participate in sport tourism travel. On the basis of 464 questionnaires gathered from active participants of 16 small-scale sport events in four different outdoor sports, exploratory factor analysis was conducted on motivational statements and revealed a conceptually clear sevenfactor structure. One of them, titled 'Nature', was the second most important motivational dimension for participants but differences between particular sports were considerable. In terms of business model elements included in the survey, participants gave high importance to all elements related to the natural environment and safety and security. Scenic destination, scenic and interesting course, course safety and event safety were the most important elements of event business models for participants in all four sports. Environmental management and proper implementation of security and crowd control measures were also singled out as important event processes. However, results of ANOVA indicate statistically significant differences between the sports in seven out of nine business model elements. These findings shed some light on the managerial aspects of sport tourism practice, helping managers to better serve sports and tourism needs at a particular event and in the destination.