Sports Tourism Destination Management Model: Khon Kaen International Marathon Case Study

Abstract

Sports tourism is a tourism activity that promotes healthy trends along with tourism and local economies. Especially to the international running activities in Thailand which continue increasing. The research objectives are then to determine key success factors with a competitive strategy for achieving international sports tourism destination, and accordingly to construct a model developed and refined by Sport Tourism Types Model (Weed, M. and Bull, C., 2004) and Psychological Continuum Model (Funk, 2009) and test an integrated model concerning the causal relationship of runner characteristic factors and sports tourism management factors that might influence runner total expenditure, intention to revisit and intention to recommend, including the moderating effects of sport engagement. Data were collected by an in-depth interview, involving questionnaires from experts, providers, sponsors, and runners (n=41, n=810 respectively). The results by cross-tabulation and one way ANOVA analysis show that local policy is a key success factor through determining distinct objective and management direction, Also There is a possibility for the KKIM event to become an international sports tourism destination in the future supported by a healthy trend and a quality of KKIM event management factors concurrent with the improvement on destination management. While the results by hierarchical multiple regression analysis and hierarchical logistic regression analysis revealed that tourism destination management factor has significant positive effects on runner’s expenditure and to encourage their intention to revisit and intention to recommend, organizing and communication factors are significantly included. Besides, the characteristic of the highest spending is a middle-age foreign runner who concerns healthiness and engages with the sport.