Abstract:
Sports tourism is one of the ways for countries to rebuild the tourism sector. Existing literature on Bao as a board game is mostly from a historical, educational, and cultural angle, whilst there is less attention on the potential of Bao as sports tourism. To expand the literature, this study focuses on Bao from a sports tourism perspective by exploring the perception of Bao as sports tourism from the residents’ views. An interpretivism paradigm approach was applied, and the data collection instrument was designed with open-ended questionnaire to gather data from the respondents. Purposive sampling was used to select the respondents, and the collected qualitative data was subjected to content and thematic analysis. The main findings revealed that perception of Bao as sports tourism from residents’ views such as leisure, refreshing the mind, locals and tourists are attracted to Bao, can play Bao with family and friends, and locals and tourists join playing Bao. Further findings revealed that a sense of belonging to a group and a sense of belonging to a community is how residents perceive Bao as sports tourism. Researchers in other parts of the world, such as South Asia, where mancala board games are played, can conduct similar studies and even go beyond to apply a quantitative approach to further understand the phenomenon of mancala from a tourism marketing perspective. The tourism stakeholders such as destination marketing organizations should consider the factors such as leisure, refreshing the mind, the attraction of locals and tourists to Bao, and the sense of belonging to a group or community when promoting Bao as sports tourism.
