Assessing and Considering the Wider Impacts of Sport-Tourism Events: A Research Agenda Review of Sustainability and Strategic Planning Elements

Abstract

Sport-tourism events create a broad spectrum of impacts on and for host communities. However, sustainable sport-tourism events, which emphasize positive impacts, and minimize negative impacts, do not arise by chance—they need careful planning and implementation. This paper aims to review and systematize a wide spectrum of social impacts that outdoor sport-tourism events create from the perspective of key stakeholders and addresses strategic planning elements necessary for achieving event sustainability. To reach its objectives, the authors examined the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database, searching for relevant scientific papers focusing primarily on the impacts and legacy of sport events, strategic planning elements, and attributes necessary for achieving sustainability through a systematic quantitative review and content analysis. The results indicate that the relevant literature mostly focuses on economic impacts, followed by social and environmental impacts. Most studies focus on Europe and Asia, with the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups being the most popular type of event studied. To systemize event and destination strategic elements and attributes for achieving sustainability, this study considers eight categories: social, cultural, organizational, logistic, communication, economic, tourism, and environmental. This paper identifies the main research gaps, proposes a new holistic sport-tourism events research agenda and provides recommendations so that organizers can avoid planning, organizing, financing mistakes and better leverage future sporting events.

Optimizing Temporal Business Opportunities

“…The use of GIS and simulation by systems provides concrete answers on when the service points should be established with proficiency on timing accounting on the fact visitors arrive in the event scene at different times. At the same time, some visitors arrive significantly earlier before the event, others arrive immediately on the event's kick-off, and others arrive when the event is at the peak (Kersulić, Perić, & Wise, 2020). These modelings also provide essential information to answer how many service points are optimal to the size of the gathering expected.…”

Spectators’ Understanding of the Environmental Impacts of a Sport Event in Port Elizabeth, South Africa

“…Negative impacts on the environment are categorized according to resource usage, namely human behaviour towards the destination environment (Holden, 2009cited in Kruger, 2015. According to Kepulić et al, (2020) sport events present particular challenges such as waste pollution, air pollution, water pollution and abnormal noise levels. Pollution may be the result of spectators littering and not bagging, or containing their waste, or noise pollution.…”

“…Other negative impacts of sport events may include waste and over-consumption of natural resources during events (Kiani et al, 2019 andKepulić et al, 2020). Additionally, as some of these events occur in an environment, they may eliminate the amount of open spaces, which then detracts from the appeal of an environment, resulting in an unattractive destination for locals and visitors.…”

The Importance of Sport Event on Hotel Performance for Restarting Tourism After COVID-19

“…Most of the event impact studies are focused on economic impact, even though there were significant efforts made to assess the social impact [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and environmental impact [25,26] of sports events. More recently, we are witnessing a growing number of studies estimating the perception of local residents towards the event ( [20,21,27,28], p. 1), [29,30], yet some of them come with conflicting conclusions.…”

“…However, the economic impact has widely become, and still is, one of the most cited and most used techniques to decide on whether to host an event or not [22,33]. In addition, the economic impact assessment is also about to maintain as the most popular means to evaluate the public expenditure about the hosting of a sporting event [34].…”