“One Event, One City”: Promoting the Loyalty of Marathon Runners to a Host City by Improving Event Service Quality

China has entered into a new developmental phase where the government can promote national fitness, the sports industry, and city tourism, simultaneously. Rapidly becoming the largest single sporting events in China, marathon events help facilitate this integration. However, event organizers tend to focus on winning bids for events instead of improving event services and increasing the loyalty of runners to the host city, which could benefit the city for sustainable development. In this study, the antecedents affecting marathon runner loyalty to the city hosting the annual hallmark event (i.e., destination loyalty) were investigated by studying a sample of 392 repeat runners during a recent HengQin International Marathon (HQ-M). Conducting structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses, the proposed model, integrating event service quality (ESQ), destination image (DI), satisfaction (SAT), and destination loyalty (DLOY), was confirmed. Nine hypothesized paths were identified among these four constructs, including six direct paths and three indirect paths. Meanwhile, mediation effects and serial mediation effects of DI and SAT between ESQ and DLOY were found. Good ESQ, positive DI, and high SAT were found both separately and collectively to enhance DLOY and have important implications for the strategic marketing of sporting events and sustaining city brand image.

Examining the Event Service Quality for Travelers with Mobility Impairments by Korean Caregivers' Perspective

Travelers with mobility impairments (TwMI) often have difficulty traveling alone due to various constraints and barriers. Caregivers of TwMI might play an important role in mitigating these constraints and barriers for TwMI. Knowing the event service quality for TwMI from the point of view of caregivers is essential for better quality of travel for both caregivers and TwMI. So far, although event service quality is important for people with disabilities, most of the studies have been conducted with people without disabilities. As caregivers' opinion is critical for deciding event participation, this study focused on perspective of caregivers regarding event service quality for TwMI. This study utilized structure equation modeling (SEM) analysis to empirically examine the relationship among event service quality for TwMI in terms of perspective of caregivers who accompanied TwMI to the event, caregivers' event satisfaction with TwMI, and caregivers' behavior intentions. From two event service qualities for TwMI, only service environment quality for TwMI demonstrated statistical significance on caregivers' event satisfaction with TwMI while service provider quality for TwMI had no statistical significance on both caregivers' event satisfaction with TwMI and caregivers' behavior intention. Caregivers' event satisfaction with TwMI demonstrated statistical significance on caregivers' behavior intention. Overall, this study may provide practical information to event organizers and other hospitality industries related to service quality for TwMI from various points of view.

Grid production with the ATLAS Event Service

ATLAS has developed and previously presented a new computing architecture, the Event Service, that allows real time delivery of fine grained workloads which process dispatched events (or event ranges) and immediately streams outputs. The principal aim was to profit from opportunistic resources such as commercial cloud, supercomputing, and volunteer computing, and otherwise unused cycles on clusters and grids. During the development and deployment phase, its utility also on the grid and conventional clusters for the exploitation of otherwise unused cycles became apparent. Here we describe our experience commissioning the Event Service on the grid in the ATLAS production system. We study the performance compared with standard simulation production. We describe the integration with the ATLAS data management system to ensure scalability and compatibility with object stores. Finally, we outline the remaining steps towards a fully commissioned system.

Distributed Interoperable Virtual Environments

This paper discusses the implementation of three types of network support based on distributed virtual environment communication models using World2World toolkit, CORBA platform, and its CORBA Event Service as well. These supports encompass an integrated communication environment on a network that is suitable for distributed virtual reality applications. Finally, performance analyses from such supports are presented.