Understanding the delivery of experience: Conceptualising business models and sports tourism, assessing two case studies in Istria, Croatia

Business models describe an organisation's activities and how value is delivered to the customer. When it comes to sports tourism, value delivered to the guests takes the form of a sports experience. Indeed, attractive sports experiences have become products that require much effort to design, manage, and eventually sell. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether two cases, having access to similar key resources, could provide tourists with identical sports experiences. The focus will be on the linkage between customer value proposition, sports facilities, and processes as major building blocks of the business providing different sports experiences. A case study method was used for a holistic and in-depth analysis of how sports tourism experiences are delivered by looking at two existing case studies in Istria, Croatia. The concept of experience was used to analyse tennis experiences that these two cases offer to tourists. Data were gathered by observations on site and by qualitative semi-structured interviews with key sports managers and organisers in the case study companies. The research results indicate that despite different approaches, both companies provide its tourists with similar tennis experiences, and that some other variables, primarily features of a sports facility (in our case tennis courts) affect the type of an experience.