Identifying service product features associated with visitor satisfaction and revisit intention: A focus on sports events.

To date, it remains very challenging for managers to combine different features of sports events into compelling product/service offerings that meet visitors' expectations. Yet, there is a scarcity of research that demonstrates how sport event managers can overcome this challenge, thereby leaving a gap in the sporting event literature. To fill part of this gap, this study used an in-depth bibliographic review to identify features commonly associated with product/service offerings at sports events and then used those features to create a new measuring instrument to examine different service offering scenarios. In this respect, seven key features were combined into 19 service offering scenarios. A total of 2229 responses were collected through structured questionnaires at six sports events in Taiwan. Then, this study used the collected responses to explore the associations amongst the 19 service offering scenarios, visitor satisfaction, and revisit intention using multiple regression equations. After examining the suitability of the models, the best fit models were then depicted with path analysis graphs for comparisons and contrasts. The findings of this study provide important insights on how sporting event marketers or destination managers can combine different product/service characteristics to build a set of product/service offering scenarios and then test the product/service offering scenarios that best meet visitors' expectations and also increase visitors' satisfaction level and their intention to come back. • Features associated with service offerings at sports events were identified. • Seven features were combined to form 19 service offering scenarios (SOS 1-19). • A positive association between the SOS, satisfaction, and comeback was found. • The best path models were found with SOS 3 , 12 , 15 satisfaction, and comeback. • This study shows how to combine different features to build better SOS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]