eSports Tourism: Sports Tourism in a Modern Tourism Environment

One of the challenges emerging from the ever-growing tourism market is the utilization of new technologies and trends to create new and attractive tourism products. eSports are a modern Web-oriented, technological trend that has the potential to create new tourism products and destinations. The “eSports tourism” has many similarities to traditional sports tourism, with the exception that the main attraction, in the case of eSports tourism, is that the speculators are watching video game players instead of athletes participating in traditional individual or team sports. The worldwide growing market of eSports with a buyer size of $906 million in 2018 (Influencer Marketing Hub. (2020). https://influencermarketinghub.com/growth-of-esports-stats/ ) creates promising opportunities for the development of eSports tourism in Greece as well. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the potentials of such a special tourism form by studying and describing the context of eSports tourism, under the following aspects: (a) the consuming behavior of a eSports tourists, (b) the economic impact, in terms of tourism-related revenue, mainly spread in the destination, and (c) the case of eSports tourism as an event or congress tourism form as well as its differences with sports tourism and other special and alternative tourism forms. The opportunities arising in Greece and especially in cities like Patras are discussed, mostly due to the congress venues and the existing technological infrastructures. The paper is conceptual and the methodology followed focuses mainly on Internet research, related articles, social media, and scientific papers.