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Sports generate significant and heterogeneous flows of travellers; however the management implications of consciously treating sport as a tourist attraction have not yet been comprehensively explored. This essay recognizes that many sports function as tourist attractions and, as such, may influence seasonal patterns of tourist demand. Leiper's tourism attraction systems approach offers a theoretical basis for conceptualizing sport as a tourist attraction 1 [1 N. Leiper, ‘Tourist Attraction Systems’, Annals of Tourism Research, 17, 3 (1990), 371–2. ]. This approach provides a framework for exploring the three key elements of a tourism attraction: the human element, nucleus and marker or informative element, as they apply to sport. These theoretical discussions on sport attractions and seasonality are then applied to the case of rugby union in New Zealand.
James Higham (Wed,) studied this question.