Sport Tourists’ Involvement with a Destination: A Stage-Based Examination

The purpose of this research is to examine sport tourists’ involvement with a destination that hosts a sport event to enable understanding of how a tourist–destination relationship forms. To bolster this understanding, the psychological continuum model (PCM) is applied as a framework to assess sport tourists’ involvement with a destination across four progressive stages. A questionnaire was administered to sport tourists in an international marathon event in the United States (N = 1,029). To allocate these sport tourists into distinct stages that represent an increased psychological connection to the destination, a three-step staging tool using destination involvement (DI) was applied. The findings indicate the progressive development of DI among these sport tourists results in increasingly high place attachment and revisit intentions. The results provide support for DI as an indicator that allows destination marketers to understand sport tourists’ destination attitude as well as predict behavioral intention.