Abstract
For effective strategic planning and focused marketing campaigns, it is essential to understand the museum's target audience and how cultural tourism can influence sports tourism. The study aims to investigate the satisfaction and experience of international visitors to the Museum of Futebol Clube do Porto and their profiles. The TripAdvisor reviews were considered to gather information on the Museum of Futebol Clube do Porto's target audience using a business intelligence tool to process, analyze, and draw conclusions from the data. Insights regarding the geographic and gender distribution of reviewers and their overall evaluations of the museum were discovered by analysing TripAdvisor reviews.
TopIntroduction
In addition to becoming a more popular leisure activity for a broader social class, sports have become more widespread (Ito & Higham, 2020). It is one of the most common leisure activities in the modern world, along with tourism. Football has become a significant tourism focus, especially in big cities (Edensor et al., 2021).
Sports tourism is one of the most vibrant subsectors of the tourism industry. Sports-related travel is thought to account for 15% to 30% of all international tourism receipts, and the expectation for the industry's growth in the coming years points to a continued rise in these journeys (Vehmas, 2010).
Sport may be a major cultural tourist attraction (Kusnoto et al., 2024) since it gives travellers a unique insight into a particular location's customs, history, and character (Wong et al., 2020). Sports-related activities and events are frequently intricately woven into local culture, and they can give tourists a rich and genuine experience that captures the essence and character of the host town. In the modern world, sport plays a significant socio-cultural function that extends to the tourism industry. Sports tourism can, therefore, be viewed as a distinct phenomenon of contemporary society, reflecting current trends, desires, and lifestyles like the pursuit of intense emotions or leading an active lifestyle (Malchrowicz-Mosko & Munsters, 2018).
Sports tourism can take one of two fundamental forms: active or passive (Kuchkarova, 2023; Ritchie & Adair, 2002; Terzić et al., 2021). Active sport tourism involves participating physically in competitions to practice sports, while passive sport tourism involves going to attractions and watching sporting activities (Woodham, 2017).
Travel involving participating in or watching sporting events or activities is referred to as sport tourism (Dixon et al., 2023; Gibson, 2003; Smith & Stewart, 2007). The most precise and thorough definition of sport tourism was provided by Gibson in 1998: “Leisure-based travel that takes individuals temporarily outside of their home communities to participate in physical activities, to watch physical activities, or to venerate attractions associated with physical activities” (Gibson, 1998, p. 10).
This can be attending professional or recreational sporting events, participating in athletic camps or clinics, engaging in extreme sports like bungee jumping, skiing, or surfing, or even visiting sports halls of fame and museums. Visits to famous stadiums or sports museums are becoming increasingly popular (Jeong & Kim, 2020).
Sports tourism involves cultural excursions centred on the sport, allowing visitors to learn about the sport's material, intangible, and non-material heritage (Malchrowicz-Mosko & Munsters, 2018).
Against this background, this work aims to identify the consumer profile of the Museum of Futebol Clube do Porto through the analysis of online reviews obtained from TripAdvisor. As a case study will be considered, the Museu do Futebol Clube do Porto, which originated in a professional football team called Futebol Clube do Porto (FCP), is situated in Porto, Portugal. António Nicolau d'Almeida, a well-known businessman and sports fan, created it on September 28, 1893 (FC Porto, 2024a). One of the top football teams in Portugal (Vieira & Simões, 2024), FCP has a long and illustrious history of local and international triumphs (FC Porto, 2024a). TripAdvisor is a website built on the premise that tourists rely on the reviews of other travellers to plan their journeys, or at the very least, can be suitably helped by them. TripAdvisor has 25 million monthly visitors, 10 million travel reviews and opinions contributed by 5 million registered members (TripAdvisor, 2023).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social media: These aggregates of online communications channels can be considered tools that can be used to define new business models strategically, taking into consideration analyses of community user-generated content and information shared with other members of these online communities.
Tourism Industry: One of the largest industries in the world. It emerged to satisfy the human need to travel to and see different places as part of the service sector, including hospitality (e.g., accommodation, restaurants), transportation (e.g., airlines, car rental), travel facilitation and information (e.g., tour operators, tourist information centres), and attractions and entertainment (e.g., heritage sites and traditional and cultural events).
Tourism Experience: This is a set of activities in which individuals engage on their personal terms, such as pleasant and memorable places, allowing each tourist to build his or her own travel experiences so that these satisfy a wide range of personal needs, from pleasure to a search for meaning.
Cultural Heritage: This comprises physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a place or society that are inherited from past generations. Tangible heritage includes buildings, monuments, landscapes, books, works of art, and artifacts. Intangible heritage includes folklore, traditions, language, and knowledge.
Cultural Tourism: Type of tourism activity in which the visitor's essential motivation is to learn, discover, experience, and consume the tangible and intangible cultural attractions/products in a tourism destination, which can include heritage, gastronomy, sports among others destination cultural aspects.
Business Intelligence: This results from information systems that combine data with analytical tools to provide information relevant to decision-making while seeking to improve the quality and availability of this information to decision-makers.
Sports Tourism: Refers to the visitors who visit a city or place to watch a sport event, or participate in the sports, the latter may also be called active sport tourism.
Online Consumer Behavior: This is the focus of studies of consumers and the online processes they employ to choose, consume, and dispose of products and services.