Casino Tourism in the Tourist Destination Iguaçu: the motivations of Brazilian tourists

Abstract

Casino tourism is the subject of the present investigation, whose spatial focus includes the region of the Tourist Destination Iguaçu, on the triple border between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, which offers gambling as one of its products. The research contributes to reducing an existing gap in the literature on casino tourism in Brazil, seeking to understand the motivations of flows to these attractions from the tourist's perspective. The general objective is to identify the motivational factors that lead Brazilian tourists to visit the casinos of the Tourist Destination Iguaçu. The methodology used was of a qualitative and documentary nature, having as a source of data comments from tourists on the TripAdvisor platform. Comments were captured using Python software, obtaining a sample of 2,197 comments in Portuguese, between August 2012 and March 2020. Data tabulation and processing were performed with mechanisms for text analysis from the R software, which generated a set of quadrigrams (sequences of four words) to catalog the motivational factors that emerged from the analyzed corpus. Applying content analysis, the quadrigrams were classified into the motivational categories of the two-dimensional push and pull model proposed by Dann (1977) and Crompton (1979). It was observed that the motivations that most encourage tourists to visit casinos (push) are concentrated on the factors “novelty”, followed by “socialization” and “rest and relaxation”. Regarding the characteristics that attract tourists to the casinos (pull), the factors “infrastructure” appear, followed by “bars and entertainment” and “accommodations and transport”.