Speaker
Description
The purpose of the paper is to analyze the possibility of promoting a tourist destination through events, especially through sports events. The growth of tourist traffic over the past 60 years has been exponential, facilitated by several causes, among which: demographic growth, population income growth, the increasing ease of traveling over ever greater distances, and other causes. Under these conditions, the competition between various tourist destinations has become fiercer, having among the consequences a rather serious drop in the rates of tourist services, which became cheaper and cheaper. Therefore, destination management organizations have sought to find innovative solutions to attract new tourists, so that the race to lower rates does not lead to the inefficiency of these services and, subsequently, to the disappearance of providers.
As mass tourism has already shown some major weaknesses, most destinations are trying to reorient themselves towards sustainable tourism, even if this sometimes involves addressing niche forms of tourism. Sports tourism and sports events can, in this sense, be a good promoter of a destination. It is also the case with Sibiu which, after the moment of 2007, when it was the European Capital of Culture, has grown almost constantly in terms of the number of tourists. The destination has thus reached the situation where it must reinvent itself, to diversify the tools and reasons through which it tries to attract new visitors.
The Sibiu International Marathon, the subject of the analysis of this paper, was designed to have a double component: a sporting event, intended to attract athletes and runners, but at the same time a philanthropic event, intended to help support some social causes that, once financed and implemented, will bring a big plus to the community and its members.
The aim of the paper is to validate the assumption that such a major sporting event can be a tourism promoter for a destination like Sibiu. We will try to obtain this validation based on interviews with representatives of the event organizers, the Sibiu Community Foundation, but also by analyzing available annual data series related to this event.
