The Trends in Dining, Lodging, Entertainment, and Recreation among Virginia Youth Travel Soccer Participants, Their Family, and Friends When Traveling for Youth Travel Soccer Tournaments

If the Convention and Visitors Bureau’s (CVB’s) and Sport Event Planners of smaller cities and towns were able to assess the trends of their youth soccer tourists, they might be in a better position to attract and retain these tourists as well as other tourists in other sports, large events or small. The purpose of this study was to examine where Virginia youth soccer participants, their family, and friends dine, lodge, entertain, recreate, and spend their free time when not playing soccer. This study takes a look at the growing business of youth soccer travel as it relates to the multi-billion dollar a year sport tourism industry. Relationships are shown in this study on where, when and how much money youth soccer tourists spend at a tournament destination compared to a 2008 study done by the National Association of Sports Commissions (NASC) on overall youth sporting event trends. Other relationships in this study include a listing of other popular activities that youth soccer tourists partake of during their free time in the host community also compared to the NASC study. There has been a lack of research done in the field of youth sport tourism because it is a fairly new business to track, but it is rapidly growing. There are also not many sport tourism studies focused on the smaller communities. A questionnaire was created to collect the data for this study. These questions were selected to better find out just who, and what kind of visitors these cities in Virginia are getting with these tournaments in hopes that the information gathered will help in planning and being prepared for future youth soccer events in Virginia as well as help other smaller communities plan other sporting events in other states. 1 Russo and Zarick: The Trends in Dining, Lodging, Entertainment, and Recreation amon Published by ScholarWorks@GVSU, 2010 Journal of Tourism Insight s Vol. 1 No. 1 91 Information is gathered on what hotels visitors for the sporting event stay in, what restaurants they dine at, where they go to shop, where they go to find a beer, and everything in between about the visitor’s experience. This information is gathered to help these municipalities develop plans on how to keep these visitors coming back and for developing ideas for the future marketing of events. From the time the visitor for the sporting event steps foot in the city, or town, the CVB wants to know their every step until the time they leave. This requires the CVB’s to do research on the people that are coming to the events related to the event itself. Before research can be done at the event itself, it is important for the researcher to know in general what kind of people are coming, by gender, nationality, age, socioeconomic status, etc. Once the researcher has a general idea of the people that they may have at the event they then can move into gathering information on how these people act inside the city or town, which in some cases is completely different then how they act in their hometown. (CVB-online, 2009). While the larger CVB’s do the research on the large sporting events of the world to find out what sport travelers want and need, what about small town USA? Sure there are cities like Indianapolis, Indiana and Miami, Florida, who year after year host some of the largest sporting events on the planet, but what about Lynchburg, Virginia or Rock Hill, South Carolina? These smaller cities may never host a Final Four or a Super Bowl, but that does not necessarily mean they do not host sporting events and receive a direct economic stimulus from sport tourists. These communities and thousands like them have CVB’s just like the larger cities, but a lot of these smaller CVB’s are often times focused on filling hotel rooms only and are not concerned with the local soccer tournament that may have brought in $1 million dollars to a lot of other businesses in a weekend. Filling hotels is a goal, but preparing restaurants, movie theatres, and miniature golf courses for visitors is also important. It is important for these communities to maximize their potential and bring in events that have the best economic impact on the community, but sometimes creating a bunch of smaller goals is better in the long run then focusing on one big goal.