The socio-economic impact of sports tourism events in rural areas and losses from COVID19: a case study in Spain

ABSTRACT

This work evaluates the effects that several outdoor ‘popular’ sports events, held in the province of Huesca, had on production and employment in the Aragonese economy (a European region in Northeast Spain). We use data from 880 questionnaires responded to by participants of the most significant and recent sporting events held in Huesca. The data have been used to build a vector of final demand increases. For the analysis, we update the input-output table for Aragon from the last one available, from 2005 to 2010. Using the input-output methodology, the results suggest positive effects on production and employment in most sectors (estimated to be about equal to current losses from not having these events, due to COVID19) The events under examination are typically 1-day affairs and have relatively low costs (registration income surpasses costs, and typically use public unused/unsaturated spaces).

KEYWORDS:

• Sport tourism events
• input-Output models
• multiplier analysis
• Huesca (Aragon, Spain)

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A10
• C67
• D57
• E24
• L83
• R00
• R58
• Z2
• Z3

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for comments received from the editors and reviewers which have helped us to improve the article. We would like to express our gratitude for the partial funding received from the Spanish Government under projects ECO2013-41353-P, ECO2016-74940-P, PID2019-106822RB-I00, and from the Aragonese Regional Government via the S10 consolidated group. We would also like to thank the organization “Peña Guara” and Javier Fernández Comuñas for the data provided.

Disclosure statement

Nopotential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1 To the extent that sports tourism is reaching a stage of maturity as an academic field (Gibson 2003; Weed 2008) Weed 2009)). The role of sports tourism in destination marketing and in generating media exposure, and an increasing concern to develop positive perceptions among local residents, are the most widely researched topics. Similarly, growing interest in scientific literature has focused on the economic impacts of sport (Salgado-Barandela, Barajas, and Sánchez-Fernández 2017).

2 There are a handful of other outdoor “popular” sport events, e.g. skiing and swimming, but they are marginal compared to the cited ones..

3 Participant contact was made via e-mail, sent to more than 9,000 individuals by the organizers of the events.

4 Two of them used to have a large number of participants, the Quebrantahuesos/Treparriscos with 8,000–11,000 participants (depending on the year) and the Orbea Monegros BTT, with 8,000–10,000 participants. The Marcha Aspace, in our sample,and the GTTAP were ranked third and fourth, respectively.

5 The full list of mountain races, running races, orientation and walking events, to which one could add the 25 cycling events was obtained through PRAMES (which stands for Aragonese Mountain, Climbing and Hiking Projects and Accomplishments in Spanish) and verified through the Runedia website.

6 See www.c-intereg.es. For the methodology, (Llano et al. 2010).

7 The links to the surveys were provided to the registered participants after the race. An approximate translation in English can be found at https://es.surveymonkey.com/r/9MD9HTL, which was also used independently by the authors in the years 2018–2019 in its Spanish version as check and complementarity of some results.

8 The extent to which these events can be representative of the total of 127 events is based on: 1) The fact that we covered different location areas of the events (through several “comarcas” or counties in the province) and disciplines. Without doubt the most numerous are mountain and running races. Then, for distance, Xathlons are also relatively popular, while orientation and walking races are less common. Some type of running and cycling races were not represented in the sample of surveys. Although we did not include the data in the results section, the authors also sent the Spanish version of the “surveymonkey” (footnote 5) to regular participants of some of these events, illustrating that the levels of spending on cycling races could be assimilated with mountain races and Xathlons (forms of biathlon, triathlon, etc.), and confirming that much less is spent on walking events. 2) due to the number of participants, there are very few “noncompetitive sports competitions” as popular as the Walk-race Aspace and GTTAP, in terms of participant numbers. 3) In this regard, based on the websites of each of the events identified in the Runedia website, we estimated that 11,991 participants of those 6 events represent around 20% of subscribers of all the 127 events.

9 For this reason, we complemented these surveys to “official” participants of other regular participants of Triathlon” races, finding consistent responses.

10 Covering several levels of difficulty and hardness, the longest distance of the GTTAP consists of 105 km, with 6,760 m+ (6,760 m accumulated positive elevation gain). The trail has been increasingly receiving participants, with a new record in 2018 of more than 3,700 participants in the 5 modalities of trail. The UTG Somontano also covers several levels of difficulty, at 103 km, and 5,300 m + . The triathlon includes 1,800 m of swimming, 72 km of cycling, and 14 km of running, which are all longer distances than the standard Olympic distance (in between the Olympic and the so-called “middle distance” or “half ironman”).

11 We could link this with literature relating self-expressiveness to a sport activity and the activity’s perceived importance, perceived difficulty, potential for self-realization, and perceived effort (Bosnjak et al. 2014), similar to the studies relating sports fan motivation components, demographic factors, and likeliness to travel for sport tourism (Nezakati, Chin, and Akhoundi 2013).

12 Wholesale and Retail; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; transportation and storage; hotel industry; information and communications.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Gobierno de Arag?n [S10 consolidated group]; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovaci?n y Universidades [PID2019-106822RB-I00,RTI2018-099858-A-I00].