Marko Perić

Sports and events play an important role in local identity building and creating a sense of community that encourages participation and increases social capital. Rural communities are specific areas with special needs and can face challenges and restraints when it comes to event organisation. The purpose of this paper is to identify organisational challenges and analyse the potential to achieving long-term sustainable social and economic outcomes linked to small-scale sports events in rural communities. Organisational challenges of rural communities in terms of organising sport events are examined and discussed using the framework of event leveraging developed by O’Brien and Chalip. This methodology is applied and discussed to a case study focusing on small-scale winter sport events in rural Croatia. Semi-structured interviews with local organisers were conducted in order to collect data on the overall event organisation and management, local coordination, role of community stakeholders and challenges facing strategic planning, with the intent to identify objectives for future events. Results were discussed independently and in the context of the leverage framework, with reflection on its applicability to rural communities as the event organisers. Recommendations are provided based on critical insight from the literature and are oriented on how to streamline the process of organising, delivering and managing of events in remote rural communities. Finally, the idea of inter-community organisation is proposed to ensure long-term social and economic benefits and to address the existing issues of overlapping of stakeholder categories, mixed objectives, distrust among stakeholders and inefficiently used local resources.

Business models describe an organisations activities and how value is delivered to the customer. When it comes to sports tourism, value delivered to the guests takes form of a sports experience. Indeed, attractive sports experiences have become products that require much effort to design, manage and eventually sell. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether two cases, having access to similar key resources, could provide tourists with identical sports experiences. The focus will be on the linkage between customer value proposition, sports facilities and processes as major building blocks of the business providing different sports experiences. A case study method was used for a holistic and in-depth analysis of how sports tourism experiences are delivered by looking at two existing case studies in Istria, Croatia. Pine and Gilmore’s (1998) two dimensional concept of experience was used to analyse tennis experiences that these two cases offer to tourists. Data was gathered by observations on site and by qualitative semi-structured interviews with key sports managers and organizers in the case study companies. The research results indicate that despite different approaches, both companies provide its tourists with similar tennis experiences, and that some other variables, primarily features of a sports facility (in our case tennis courts) affect the type of an experience.

Wise, N. and M. Perić. 2017. Developing a Research Agenda to Assess Local Social Impacts of Sports Tourism Regeneration in Medulin, Croatia. In Urban Transformations: Geographies of Renewal and Creative Change edited by N. Wise and J. Clark, 211–226. London: Routledge.

Istria County, positioned in the north and westernmost part of Croatia along the northern Adriatic coast, is a popular destination among tourists from central Europe. While the Istria region has existing tourism infrastructures already well-developed, it is still important to consider regenerative strategies and attempts to diversify tourism and promote tourism during the off-season. Tourism managers and planners in Istria seek to create opportunities to maintain the regions competitive advantage. Sports tourism has been a focus in this region for some time, and across the region there have been numerous investments and plans aimed at regenerating sports infrastructure to attract more tourists and support events. The Mediterranean climate makes the region attractive to tourists during the warm dry summer months. For the sports tourist, the moderate climate and range of amenities enable year-round sports activity. Regenerating towns and cities to update sports tourism products, facilities and infrastructures represents an approach to develop year-round tourism. According to the Croatian Ministry of Tourism, in 2015 Istria County accounted for 23.5% of the total tourist arrivals and 29.3% of the total tourist overnight stays in Croatia (Ministry of Tourism, 2016). These are observed as slight decreases from previous years, which were just over 24% and 30% respectively (Ministry of Tourism, 2015). Investing in new sports tourism opportunities and new facilities represents not only an attempt to increase tourism, but a strategy to establish new enterprises and benefits for a range of stakeholders.

For this study, we conducted an open-ended survey with seven industry managers (from the tourism, sports tourism and hospitality industries). To protect the identity of survey participants we have not referred to peoples’ names, using instead Participant 1-7. The objective of this chapter is to focus on strategic regeneration and management plans involving sport, tourism and event opportunities in Croatia’s Istria Region, with much of the focus on Medulin and Pula. This part of Croatia has recently seen new investments sport and events facilities. Observed as an attempt to regenerate the industry, this chapter builds on foundation research concerning Medulin (Wise & Perić, 2017). The purpose of our wider research is to discuss how different investments in a variety of sports create new opportunities. This is seen as developing and sustaining off-season tourism and also considers how locals can and will benefit. For locals involved or employed in tourism and the service sector in Croatia, employment is often limited during the winter months when tourism drastically declines or operations cease. Responses from sport and tourism industry managers from Medulin and Pula are presented here to show how sports tourism products are being developed and delivered to practically frame the direction of sports tourism-led regeneration efforts. This chapter will firstly discuss sports tourism-led regeneration in Istria before discussing perspectives from industry managers. Subsequent sections look at the need for upgraded facilities, tourism strategy and social impacts. These sections are followed by concluding remarks and some directions for future research.