Effect of Sports Nostalgia on the Word-of-Mouth Communication of Rural Tourism: A Mediating Effect of Destination Experience

The Guizhou Rongjiang's "Village Super League" has attracted wide attention. With the emotional broadcaster theory and place attachment theory, this study, starting with the nostalgia in sport, tries to construct a mechanism model for the destination of hosting events on word-of-mouth. Specifically, destination experience serves as the mediating role, with destination awareness and sense of belonging as the moderating variables, the mechanism of the nostalgia in sport on the rural good reputation on word-of-mouth was analyzed. With literature review and the questionnaire, SPSS 29 and PROCESS Macro were employed to test the proposed model. It is found that sports nostalgia positively influences the rural destination word-of-mouth through destination experience. Moreover, destination awareness has a negative moderating effect while the sense of belonging has a positive moderating effect. The nostalgia in sport is proposed to be the core to activate the tourists' emotional resonance and then to promote their experience; folk sports events serve as the carrier to help the less famous rural areas to be tourist-characteristic destinations; the emotion potential of nostalgia in sport is motivated to improve the recovery of the tourism after public crisis.