Networking within the Tourism Industry

As research around the impacts of Mega Sport Events on host cities and regions reached is peaking in the aftermath of the FIFA World Cup 2006, the UEFA European Football Championship 2008 and the Beijing Summer Games 2008 the topic of cooperation and networking has been widely neglected in regard to MSEs. With the focus on the tourism industry of hosting regions, this work tries to start to change this, as an exploratory approach towards finding out more about the interrelationship of those two topics in tourism. As both, MSEs and cooperation are gaining more and more interest within tourism research this should also be seen as an approach to combine both to motivate further research.

Methodologically this is realized by conducting expert interview with five industry experts with valuable experience in preparing, hosting and also benefiting from a Mega Sport Event. The expert interview, as the primary research part of this work is based on the cooperation concept of Axelrod’s game theory. This basis was used to design, conduct and analyze the primary research part of this thesis.

Essentially, the thesis should be interpreted as a scientific approach to present the combination of the topics of Mega Sport Events and cooperation in tourism.