Sport tourism marketing and the factors affecting destination choices of soccer teams for seasonal preparation camps

In recent years, it has been noted that the extent and volume of sport-related travel has grown exponentially worldwide. The study of sport tourism reveals that there are a vast number of specialized markets to explore in this area. A frequently used defi-nition of sport tourism travel to play sports (active sport tourism), travel to watch sports (event sport tourism), and travel to visit or show respect famous sport related attractions. Experts divide sport tourism into further sub-categories such as resorts, participation activities, cruising, events and tours etc. Various sport tourism mar-kets, including event sport tourism, outdoor and adventure travel, health spa tour-ism and competitive sport travel exist as sub-sets of the two major fields of tourism demand; leisure travel and business travel.Football tourism, seasonal preparation camps tourism and private football tournaments (organizations) as a kind of sport event tourism can be included into the second category, namely business tourism. Because the main purpose of soccer (football) teams is not to take a holiday, pleasure, recreation, entertainment etc. or play football for fun. So, their basic objective of taking a travel to a destination and/or choosing a facility is to train and prepare their players for forthcoming sea-son. For this purpose, soccer (football) or some other sport teams are very important sport tourism markets for tourism destinations and tourism businesses supplying their services to this market. Therefore, they should know the basic needs and moti-vations of both the players of the teams as individual consumers and the managers of the clubs as organizational/professional customers.The main objective of this study is to determine or explore the basic factors affecting the decisions of soccer teams about the destination and/or facility selection for seasonal preparation camps. In order to reach this purpose, literature survey was made initially which provides the secondary data to be analyzed. Data gathered through structured questionnaire consisting of a-four category questions and investi-gating destination/facility selecting criterions developed for Turkish and foreign soccer teams was analyzed by the descriptive statistics, hypotheses tests and multi-variate statistical tests. The results indicated that the most important factors affecting destination selection decisions of the soccer teams are safety, high quality service standards and infrastructure and organized football tournaments in the destinations.