Everything you need to know about sports tourism

Twenty-one years ago, armed with a backpack and England rugby shirt, I set off for Australia. After 18 joyless months of saving up my salary and holiday days, three glorious, sunlit weeks Down Under awaited. But it wasn’t just Australia’s manifold charms that had drawn me in. England were among the favourites to win the Rugby World Cup, which was being held there that October, and I’d bought a tickets-and-accommodation package to cheer them on. Would I have sacrificed so much to go to Australia if it hadn’t been for the tournament? Doubtful. Would I have followed England on tour anywhere other than this most alluring of destinations? Definitely not.

It’s this seductive symbiosis that forms the foundation of what — in the intervening years — has grown to become one of the most profitable and influential sectors of the global travel industry. Today, sports tourism is worth more than £500 billion and accounts for 10% of the total tourism market, according to Madrid-based United Nations agency UN Tourism. And that’s set to accelerate over the coming decade, with some projections suggesting a quadrupling of the sector by 2033 to £2.25 trillion.

There are numerous economic and societal factors that feed into this, from bigger, and better promoted, events to increasingly active, health-conscious populations supporting and participating in sports. But the primary driving force is something the sporting world understands only too well: success breeds success. The demonstrable boost to income, global profile and downstream visitor numbers that has resulted from hosting high-profile events is bringing more and more destinations to the table — including those with barely any sporting pedigree to speak of.

“The industry is constantly expanding. It feels like we’re riding the crest of a wave at the moment,” says Jimmy Rowan, head of UK sports travel specialist Spectate. Catering to what it calls the ‘I was there’ moments, the Chester-based operation encompasses a dozen sports, scores of destinations and trips ranging in duration from a weekend away at a Formula One race to cricket tours such as the Ashes that last nearly two months. “What we’re seeing is that people are either building travel ideas around iconic sporting events or going to such events and tagging on a holiday as part of that.”

The growing trend of using travel to celebrate landmark birthdays and other milestones is further fuelling the sector, he says. “A lot of the time we get people who are looking to mark an anniversary or a 50th or 60th birthday by heading off for a once-in-a-lifetime sporting experience.”

Like many of the big players in sports tourism, access to the stars — usually in the form of a Q&A or after-dinner speech — is offered as an additional incentive. Book on Spectate’s four-night Abu Dhabi Grand Prix trip, for example, and you’ll find yourself brunching with Guenther Steiner, former Haas F1 team principal and star of the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive.

Get active

Spectate largely focuses on ‘passive’ sports tourism — people travelling to watch matches, races or tournaments, and combining this with more conventional touristic pursuits. But ‘active’ (i.e. participatory) trips are increasingly in demand.

Manchester-based Sports Tours International has running and cycling at the core of its business. It offers VIP trips to follow cycling’s three grand tours: the Tour de France, the Vuelta a España and the Giro d’Italia. But its ride-and-watch itineraries — tackling part of a stage in the Alps ahead of the elite riders— are another popular option.

The value of these lavish, telegenic cycling races to the tourist economies of the cities and regions they pass through is clear in the contest to host them. Competition to host the Tour’s Grand Départ — the nomadic opening of the three-week event, which is watched by more than 10 million spectators and a billion television viewers — is fierce, with destinations paying race organiser Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) many millions of pounds for the privilege.

Barcelona reportedly parted with more than £6.5 million to host the first stages of the 2026 Tour de France. The Catalan capital knows all about the long-term benefits of landing a prestige sporting event; its staging of the 1992 Olympics supercharged its ailing economy, bolstered its infrastructure and gave the city a global profile that it translated into a 30-year tourism boom.

For Sports Tours International’s running customers, participation is also the primary focus. It sends approximately 4,000 entrants a year to the six major marathons around the world, says Ben Thompson, the company’s marketing lead. It guarantees entry to these sought-after races in cities such as New York and Tokyo, handles on-the-ground logistics and builds wider holiday itineraries around the races. “I think there’s a greater awareness today that you can combine travel with the sports of your choice,” says Thompson. “It’s a whole different way of seeing the world.”

Hallowed turf

Golf is another sport that lends itself to the ‘active’ (in relative terms) side of sports tourism. Your Golf Travel is the leading UK operator in this space, handling 200,000 clients a year and offering trips to 30-plus countries. These feature rounds on iconic courses, as well as spectator packages to events such as the Ryder Cup and the Masters, in Augusta, Georgia.

Norbert Falkner achieved a lifelong dream when he travelled to the latter in 2019. The 50-year-old banker from Berkshire described his visit to the hallowed greens and fairways of Augusta National Golf Club, where he rubbed shoulders with Tiger Woods, as an almost ‘spiritual experience’. “I was first in and last out every day,” he says. “And then when it was all over, I got to travel around Georgia and play a few rounds of my own.” Falkner, a father of two teenage boys, hopes to take the family to Australia on an Ashes-focused break. “The next series is scheduled to begin in Perth, marking the first time in four decades that the opening will not be held in Brisbane. The boys would love it out there,” he says with a smile.

The Falkners aside, the sports tourism market is becoming increasingly diverse. Women’s sport has never been more high-profile or popular, exemplified by the 87,000 fans who watched England’s Lionesses win the Euros in 2022.

“We get quite a few women travelling with us on things like Caribbean cricket tours,” says Rowan from Spectate. “And where the longer tours tend to be older people or retirees with plenty of disposable income, weekends away for something like an NFL (American football) game or an F1 race are increasingly appealing to younger demographics,” he explains.

Indeed, F1 embodies many of the forces shaping the wider sports tourism boom. It’s one of the fastest-growing sports in the world; a 2021 study by research company Nielsen Sports found that both the overall fanbase and proportion of female followers had almost doubled since 2017. The Netflix series Drive to Survive is credited with much of that growth and diversification, with a poll of nearly 2,000 American F1 fans in 2022 showing that 53% traced their conversion to the show.

Subsequently, everything from tennis and horse racing to golf and gymnastics have commissioned similarly high-budget, under-the-bonnet docuseries. Engagement is the buzzword — and engaged fans, the sports tourism market is finding, are travelling fans.

This growing group has, in turn, helped to drive an expansion of the F1 calendar, which now has 24 races a year — eight more than 20 years ago. The increase in supply keeping pace with the growing demand is evident across the sporting landscape. For example, when Los Angeles last hosted the Olympics in 1984, there were 21 sports. In four years, when the Games return to California’s largest city, that number will have grown to 35. In a similar vein, the next FIFA World Cup will be the first to be played across three nations and the first to feature 48 teams, up from 32. For travelling sports fans, there’s simply never been more choice.

What happens in Vegas

Las Vegas is no stranger to sports tourism; high-profile boxing matches have been as much a part of the city’s USP over the years as Elvis and Sinatra residences. But, post-pandemic, the city has placed sport at the centre of its tourism strategy, with astonishing success. Steve Hill, CEO and president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, says a programme that now includes the Las Vegas Grand Prix and featured American sport’s flagship event, the Super Bowl, earlier this year is worth “well into the double-digit billion dollars to Las Vegas” each year.

Annual visitor numbers are almost back to their 43 million peak of 2016, but tastes are changing. “About 6% of our tourists come because of sport alone, but around double that are including it in the many reasons for visiting,” says Hill. “So, it has broadened our potential customer base and that’s important. It has also brought a global spotlight to Las Vegas that we simply couldn’t buy.”

Among the various events the city will be hosting in 2025 is a quartet of rugby league games in a single day, including Wigan against Warrington from Europe’s Super League, and two matches from the NRL, Australia’s primary domestic tournament.

This ‘portability’ of sporting events, as Hill calls it, is one reason to project unfettered growth. A leg of the Tour de France held in Rio or an Ashes Test match in Las Vegas currently sounds preposterous, but then so did the idea of staging the 2022 FIFA World Cup in the diminutive football desert of Qatar. The result? A record four million tourist arrivals in 2023. Using sport as an engine of tourism is something that Qatar’s neighbour, Saudi Arabia, has seized upon with even more success. The kingdom has invested nearly £4.6 billion in the sports industry since 2021 alone. It has hosted more than 80 international events, drawing 2.6 million attendees, in just five years — including world-title boxing bouts, ATP tennis and America’s Cup sailing.

Professor Rob Wilson, an applied sport finance expert at the University Campus of Football Business (UCFB) in London, expects the sports tourism business to rise ‘exponentially’ in coming years. He attributes this to the ongoing affordability of flights and travel, and the marketing power of the TV broadcasting of events such as the Paris 2024 Olympics and the Qatar World Cup.“This puts those destinations into the psyche of viewers,” he says. “And we’re seeing that this is influencing how they choose their next trip.”

However, there is one significant drawback to sports tourism — at least where big tournaments are concerned — as I discovered on that 2003 trip. Pessimist that I am, I only secured tickets up to the quarter-finals. This meant that, as Jonny Wilkinson was drop-kicking England to victory on that sultry evening in Sydney, I was already back at home enveloped in the dreariness of a British winter. Sometimes you just can’t win.