Sport Tourism in Barcelona: The Zurich Marathon Case Study

Abstract

This thesis analyze why sport tourist choose Barcelona as a sport destination. It is going to be based on a real case which is a case study of Zurich Marathon of Barcelona. In order to know the opinion and experience of the participants a semi-structured questionnaires using Survio software was conducted. The survey was shared by social media, Facebook Zurich Marathon official page and Corredors.cat, because was the platform those organizations contact with their participants.

As a result, what I could observe after analyzing all the questionnaires was that most of the runners are Spaniards due to the fact of the location of the event, and the tourist that came are related with the marathons world, they had run other marathon in other parts of the world. Also most of the tourist will spend more than one night in the city in order to see the most touristic elements of the city, to enjoy the weather and the gastronomy. These are big point elements when the decision making process. Some of the runners look for destinations with a good weather, healthy and good quality, and in the case of sport tourist they look for sport spaces. Added to this, some positive and negative aspects from the point of view of the participant were analyzed of the event. As an example, pasta party, guard robe and price (90€) were a big negative point, whereas a lot of runners like the track and the city and they are fascinated with the good organization of the event. Finally some recommendations were extract about this aspects for future researchers or for professionals of the events world.