A Study on Exploring of Moving Sports Tourism: Case of Bicycle tourism

Moving sport tourism refers to travel that combines sport activity and tours to a particular destination. Although moving sport tourism is one of the fastest growing segments of the sport tourism industry, it is still lack of related-knowledge and academic studies. Hence, this study is conducted to explore the characteristics of moving sport tourism and to provide implications for sport tourism industry and future research. For this, ten participants who regularly participated in bicycle tours for the last 10 years were recruited for this study. The sample consisted of 9 males and 1 female. The average age of the participants was 44.6 years of which all but 2 had a full-time job. The average period of participating in bicycle tour was 7.9 years. For analysing data, content analysis approach was used. Interviews were tape recoded and data were multiple reviewed to identify the similar themes and to categorize them into conceptual constructs. Results suggest two requirements of moving sport tourism(moving and concurrent), three characteristics of moving sport tourism(self-directed, exploring, non-linear, purposive-riding, partial competitive, cultural touring) and two categories of moving sport tourism(full moving sport tourism and partial moving sport tourism). Implications for sport tourism industry and future studies were discussed.