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Gaming and Entertainment Tourist Destinations: A World of Similarities and Differences

This paper explores the possible similarities and differences among seven selected gaming and entertainment tourist destinations across five continents, from both a structural approach and a perceptual approach. The first part of this paper draws on a diverse existing literature on entertainment. Entertainment has been seen in all gaming destinations as a concerted, integrated effort to diversify the tourist product portfolio and balance the “supposed” negative image of gaming. Additionally, entertainment itself has been established as a lucrative growth sector in its own right, not simply a supplement to gaming. The paper undertakes both a structural and perceptual comparison. The structural comparison utilized secondary data collected from archival works whereas the perceptual comparison was based on primary data collection via distribution of questionnaires to selected tourism academics residing in the destinations/countries. The results employing multidimensional scaling techniques to compare the destinations showed that there existed both many similarities and some differences between the structural and perceptual approaches. Some implications for understanding the growth of entertainment in the gaming contexts are also considered.