Understanding the relation between serious surfing, surfing profile, surf travel behaviour and destination attributes preferences

Surfing is a sporting activity that has become a major business, integrated in the leisure and tourism industries. Due to the impact of surf tourism and to the surfers’ characteristics featured by the time and effort they invest in surfing and their propensity to travel in search for the perfect wave, it is important to understand if the six serious leisure qualities (perseverance, career, effort, benefits, ethos and identity) are related with socio-demographic characteristics, surfing profile, surf travel behaviour and surfing destination attributes preferences. Aiming to achieve these goals, an online survey (in the form of a questionnaire) was applied to a casual sample of 200 surfers in Portugal. The results of this study demonstrate that surfers exhibit the six serious leisure qualities and have a strong disposition to travel for surfing. Moreover, the results highlight that surfers value mainly the surfing natural conditions when choosing a surfing travel destination. Statistical tests also allowed concluding that socio-demographic variables are not good predictors of serious surfing, although serious surfing is correlated with surfing profile, surf travel behaviour and surfing destination attributes preferences. This data enables to provide important information that can be used to strengthen management strategies by surf tourism industry providers.


Surf tourism
Surfing is a wave activity with its roots in Hawaiian culture and tradition (Buckley, 2002a). Since the early 1900's, surfing has grown as sport of Western civilization (Dolnicar & Fluker, 2003b). Since the 1960's, the popularity of surfing has progressively increased (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013;Ponting, 2008) due to the cultural changes of that period (Wheaton, 2010). Surf tourism started with independent adventure travellers searching for new surfing spots, driven by the quality of the surfing experience in other regions or climates (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013). This kind of travel peaked in the 1960s because of the image of surfing culture delivered by mass media, as well as more affordable travel and the development of lighter materials (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013;Lazarow, Miller, & Blackwell, 2008). Surf tourism gained economic, social and environmental significance and has become a significant component of the adventure (sport) tourism sector (Buckley, 2002a;2002b). Surf tourism is generally defined as travelling at least 40 km away from home, to domestic or international destinations, staying for at least one night and no more than 12 months, with surfing the primary purpose for travel. This includes active participants in surfing activities, as well as the spectators of events and those who follow them on their surfing trips (Buckley, 2002a;Dolnicar & Fluker 2003a, 2003b, 2004Fluker, 2003;Ponting, 2008).
Nowadays, surf travellers rely on surfing tour operators to help them manage their surfing trips, which has led to a "global industry involving thousands of tour operators, village home stays, resorts, charter boats, wholesalers, retail travel agents, and vertically integrated service combinations around the world" (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013, p. 112). Recent research calculated that 112 countries have available surfing tours or surfing-related information for tourists (Ponting, 2008), fostering a multimillion-dollar industry that stimulates local economies (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013).
The surfing industry in Portugal is also growing but there are no publications that identify its global economic significance. There is some evidence to indicate the growth of this sector, particularly the growth in the number of surfers (Melo, 2013), the growth in the development of more specialized services such as surf schools and surf camps, and the increase in the market for surfing-related consumer brands (Moutinho, Dionísio, & Leal, 2007). Portugal is one of the best countries in Europe in which to develop surfing activities: it has a continental coast of almost 1000 km, hosting large numbers of beaches with excellent surfing quality. These natural conditions, along with internationally renowned spots such as Ericeira (recognized during 2011 as the first World Surf Reserve in Europe, and the second one in the entire world) and Peniche (the Portuguese Capital of the Wave), and the organization of national and international top level events such as the World Surf Leagues, has allowed Portugal to create a positive destination image related to surfing (Melo, 2013).

Surfing and serious leisure
Serious leisure is a perspective that was introduced by Stebbins (1982) to analyse the seriousness with which some individuals take some leisure activities, including those who participate in sport and tourism activities (e.g. surfing). Serious leisure was defined by Stebbins (1992) as "the systematic pursuit of an amateur, a hobbyist, or a volunteer activity that participants find so substantial and interesting that, in the typical case, they launch themselves on a career centred on acquiring and expressing its special skills, knowledge, and experience" (p.3). Serious leisure is also defined in contrast with casual leisure by six interrelated qualities: perseverance, career development, personal effort, durable benefits, unique ethos, and strong identity (Stebbins, 2007).
In the last approach, Gould, et al. (2008) developed the Serious Leisure Inventory and Measure (SLIM) as an instrument to access serious leisure, composed of 54 operational items organized into 18 sub-dimensions representing the six defining qualities of serious leisure. Other studies were also developed from the SLIM, on chess (Gould, Moore, Karlin, Gaede, Walker, & Dotterweich 2011), birdwatching (Lee & Scott, 2013). From this, Barbieri and Sotomayor (2013) investigated the relationship between serious leisure, surf travel behaviour and destination preferences, confirming that surfers show high levels in the six qualities of serious leisure, and have a strong disposition for surf tourism. However, serious leisure qualities were not shown to be good predictors of surf travel behaviour (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013).
In addition, Tsaur and Liang (2008) developed an instrument to measure the serious leisure construct, dividing it into six dimensions and 21 items, to study birdwatchers and investigate the relationship between serious leisure traits and recreation specialization. Other studies were also developed from this (Campos, Portugal, & Melo, 2017;Cheng & Tsaur, 2012). Cheng and Tsaur (2012) studied the relationship between surfers' serious leisure characteristics and recreational involvement. They demonstrated that ethos, identity with surfing, significant personal efforts and career pursuits are all strong indicators of surfers' serious leisure characteristics, and that attraction and selfexpression (dimensions of recreational involvement) have the most impact, demonstrating that surfers with higher serious leisure characteristics have a higher recreational involvement.
More recently, Campos, Portugal and Melo (2017) presented a study that focuses on the segmentation of surfers in Portugal, according to the seriousness of their surfing involvement. The results from this study allow affirming that surfing can be considered a serious leisure activity, and demonstrating that surfers exhibit the six serious leisure qualities, especially related to expected benefits, career and identity, and have a strong disposition for surf tourism.
In summary, previous studies showed that surfers share the six serious leisure qualities: a) perseverance -the need for surfers to persevere in attaining the skills and knowledge required to master the waves (Butts, 2001;Ponting, 2008) but to also negotiate the many constraints they face, such as physical risks, cancelling social appointments when the waves are good, and waiting for the good waves (Butts, 2001); b) career -surfing creates the possibility of finding a career by progressing into more difficult waves (Butts, 2001), and by travelling greater distances or to special destinations to practice (Dolnicar & Flucker, 2003b); c) effort -serious surfers are characterized by the long-term personal effort they make to master their skills (Dolnicar & Fluker, 2003b) and to understand and appropriate the subculture's attitudes, knowledge and values, through a process of instruction and socialization by their peers, and by digesting information from books, videos and specialist magazines (Butts, 2001); d) benefits -evidence of durable benefits was found in the literature, especially in the form of gaining courage, self-invigoration, selfconfidence and fitness (Buckley, 2012); e) ethos -in acquiring the necessary skills and adopting appropriate behaviour surfers can, over time, become accepted member of the surfing subculture and attain their peers recognition, thus sharing the unique ethos that is present in this subculture (Butts, 2001); f) identity -surfers exhibit a tribal behaviour characterized by a strong identification which is externalized by taking their boards whenever they go to the beach (Moutinho et al., 2007), as well as through their manners of dress and language (Butts, 2001).

Purpose and objectives of the study
The study of serious leisure in sport and tourism, particularly surfing, is important because it allows an understanding of the participants' behaviour. In spite of the size and economic impact of surfing and the importance of determining the surfers' characteristics, few studies have examined this form of sport tourism and even fewer investigated the application of serious leisure among surfers. This study was developed during the year of 2014 aiming to fill this gap in the literature. Based on the serious leisure perspective, this article addresses four main objectives: a) to verify if socio-demographic characteristics are good predictors of serious surfing; b) to understand the relation between serious surfing and surfing profile; c) to identify the role of serious surfing on surfing travel behaviour; and d) to examine if the six serious surfing qualities are related with surfing destination attributes preferences.

Methodology
This study used an online survey (in the form of a questionnaire) to collect data. The questionnaire was composed of 5 groups of questions, including: a) socio-demographic characteristics (nationality, sex, age, marital status, education level, working situation, and income); b) surfing behaviours (currently surfing or not; number of years surfing, number of days surfing per week, season of the year surfing); c) surfing travel behaviour (past surfing trips, surfing destinations, length of surfing trips, travelling companionship, surfing destination choice, spending per day, willingness to take a surfing trip in the future, and future surfing destinations); d) surfing destination attributes [25 items adapted from Dolnicar and Fluker (2003b), Barbieri and Sotomayor (2013) and Reis and Jorge (2012), measured in a 7-point rating scale, ranging from 1 (not at all important) to 7 (totally important)]; and e) serious leisure related with surfing [21 items adapted from Cheng and Tsaur (2012), measured in a 7-point rating scale, ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree)]. The questionnaire was created in two languages (Portuguese and English), with identical questions and application methods [using translation and back translation (Hill & Hill, 2002)], and was validated by pre-test application and expert examination (face validity). The questionnaire was built in Google Forms platform and a casual sample technique was used (Marôco, 2011).
The target population included those who have practiced surfing activities in Portugal, and who were aged 18 years or older. The questionnaire Data was analysed in the IBM SPSS (version 21). Descriptive analyses were first conducted to present the socio-demographic characteristics of responding surfers, to describe surfing profile and surfing travel behaviour, and to analyze destination attributes preferences and the seriousness of surfing.
Factorial analysis, by Principal Component Analysis (PCA), was used for data reduction purposes (Marôco, 2011). Surfing destination attributes (25 items), and serious leisure related to surfing (21 items) were reduced to a smaller number of dimensions or PC (respectively, five and six dimensions). The following criteria were used to decide the number of components to extract (Marôco, 2011): i) Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value obtained greater than 0.6 and the significance value (using Bartlett test) below 0.1, in order to reject the null hypothesis and prove the suitability of the analytical method for the treatment of data; ii) eigenvalue greater than 1.0 or the scree Plot indicating the suitable number of PC that can be extracted before the amount of explained variance becomes too small; iii) communalities, representing the percentage of common variance between items and extracted factors; iv) factor loadings, higher than 40%; and v) variance explained percentage, at least 60% of the total variance was considered satisfactory. In addition, the reliability coefficient to assess internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha coefficient) was analysed for all dimensions and globally structured (Marôco, 2011). One item from both scales was withdrawn from the final factorial solution, to accomplish the presented criterion: destination with good cultural heritage (surfing destination attributes scale), and I persevere in Standard multiple linear regression were used to verify if socio-demographic characteristics (independent variables) are good predictors of serious surfing (dependent variables); to understand the relation between serious surfing (independent variables) and surfing profile (dependent variables); to identify the role of serious surfing (independent variables) on surfing travel behaviour (dependent variables) and; to examine if the six serious surfing qualities (independent variables) are related with surfing destination attributes preferences (dependent variables). The model assumptions were analysed and are generally satisfied, namely, the normal distribution, homogeneity and errors independency. No multicolinearity was found among the independent variables because variance inflation factor (VIF) were below conservative maximum scores (<5.0) (Marôco, 2011).
Binary logistic regression, using enter method, was also performed to predict the relation between serious surfing (independent variables) and surfing travel behaviouraverage length of surfing trips, travelling companionship, surf destinations choice and future destinations (dependent variables). The model assumptions were analyzed and are generally satisfied (Marôco, 2011).

Socio-demographic characteristics of respondents
The descriptive analysis of nationality, sex, age, marital status, level of education, working situation and income variables allowed the characterization of the socio-demographic profile of the surfers in our sample (Table1). The results show that 88.5% of respondents were Portuguese and the large majority (82.5%) were male. The average age was 34 years old (SD=± 9), with 36% in the aged 18-30 group, 49.5% in the 31-43 years group, and 14.5% aged 43 or older. The respondents were mostly single (59.5%) and a third of them were married (34.0%). The majority (75.5%) had higher levels of education, including postgraduate studies (25.5%), mainly working for others (54.0%) as well as being selfemployed or owning companies (22.0%). The majority (50.5%) of responding surfers also indicated that they have income above the Portuguese average (>€1000 per month).

Surfing profile of respondents
In terms of the surfing profile of respondents (Table 2), the large majority (84.5%) stated that, at the time of the study, they were surfers, and only 15.5% were not practicing at that time, but had done in the past. The participants are mainly (55.1%) experienced surfers, and the majority (49.1%) stated they surf 2-3 times per week, 23.1% stated that they surf 4 or more days per week. The large majority (87.6%) also reported that they surf at all times of the year, and more than two thirds (68.7%) have financial willingness to evolve in surfing.

Surfing travel behaviour of respondents
Regarding surfing travel behaviour (Table 3), the large majority (80.0%) of respondents had taken a surf trip of at least 2 days. In the last 3 years, 66.3% had visited domestic destinations, while only 33.7% travelled primarily to international destinations. In terms of the average length of travel, the majority (55.0%) had taken surf trips for 1-2 weeks, 29.4% for less than 1 week, 11.8% for 3-4 weeks, and only 6 respondents (3.8%) embarked on lengthy trips for 1-2 months. Surfers travelled mostly with friends (41.5%), 16.9% travelled with family (including children), 15.6% with the partner, and 10.0% alone. For the choice of surfing destination, 41.2% chose according to friends' suggestions, 23.1% chose through internet sites, 15.0% through the press, 6.9% according to prior visits, and 6.3% based on events/championships held previously in that destination. In terms of the amount of money spent per day, 40% spent less than €40, 50.6% between €40-120, and 9.4% more than €120.
Regarding the intention to travel in the future, 67.5% demonstrated a total willingness to travel, and 69.5% decided on international destinations, showing that surfers present a high propensity for surf tourism.

Surfing destination attributes
The analysis of the factorial structure of the 24 items of the surfing destination attributes scale (Table 4) was performed by exploratory factor analysis, with extraction of factors by the PCA method, using varimax rotation. The criteria defined to accept the factorial structure was, respectively: KMO (0.84), Bartlett test (p value = 0.000), eigenvalue greater than 1.0 or the scree plot elbow rule confirmed, factor loadings higher than 40.0%, and 69.4% of total variance explained by the 5 components. The internal consistency, evaluated by Cronbach's alpha coefficient, is considered good for the global factorial structure (0.88) and at least accep-

Serious surfing
The analysis of the factorial structure of the 20 items of the serious surfing scale (

Socio-demographic characteristics as predictors of serious surfing
Results of statistical tests (Table 6)  Effort dimension can also be predicted by socio-demographic characteristics. The model explains 7.8% of effort, and is statistically significant (F(6, 193) = 2.737; p-value = 0.014). Male sex (β = -.249, t(193) = -3.421, p-value = 0.001) was revealed to be a significant estimator of effort dimension. Considering the negative β value, men present lower values in this dimension than women.

The relation between serious surfing and surfing profile
Multiple linear regressions were also used to  test the hypothesis of if serious surfing can influence surfing profile (Table 7). The results show that the six serious surfing qualities are good predictors of the surfing experience (F(6, 162) = 6.043; p-value = 0.001), especially career (β = 0.180, t(162) = 2.401, p-value = 0.016), effort (β = -0.407, t(162) = -5.566, p-value = 0.001) and identity (β = -0.174, t(162) = -2.406, p-value = 0.016). Considering the positive β value, higher valuation in the career quality corresponds to more years of surfing, while, considering the negative β value, less effort and less identity valuation correspond to more years surfing.
The role of serious surfing on surfing travel behaviour Statistical testes indicated that the six serious surfing qualities are good predictors of surfing travel behaviour. Multiple linear regression (Table 8) indicates that the level of serious  higher values corresponds to more probability to travel for international destinations (β = -0.287; χ 2 Wald (1) = 2.707; p-value = 0.100); for benefits, higher values corresponds to more probability of never made a surfing travel (β = -0.415; χ 2 Wald (1) = 4.796; p-value = 0.029) and more probability to travel for international destinations (β = -0.395; χ 2 Wald (1) = 5.658; pvalue = 0.017) and, finally; for ethos and perseverance qualities, no statistical differences were found in relation to past surfing trips and future destination variables.

Discussion and conclusions
The results of this investigation allowed reinforcing the understanding of the serious leisure perspective as an important conceptual framework to study sport tourism participants . More specifically, this study contributes to the understanding of surf tourism, an important and emergent sport tourism sector in Portugal, by determining the surfers' socio-demographic characteristics, their surfing profile, surfing travel behaviour and surfing destination attributes.
Socio-demographic characteristics of responding surfers from this study is similar to other nature sports participants in Portugal (Melo & Gomes, 2017), and to surfers reported in other studies from the literature (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013;Dolnicar & Flucker, 2003a). According to the results of this study, surfers in Portugal are mainly male, young/adult individuals with decreasing participation with the increase in age, with very high level of education, working for others, and with income above the Portuguese average. Respondents are also mostly experienced surfers with a frequent participation in surfing activities along the year, and with financial willingness to evolve in surfing. In this regard, the potential of the surfing activities is very attractive, given the high propensity of surfers to practice surfing activities along the year and their sociodemographic composition (with more educational qualifications and higher monthly incomes), which allow having more sustainable behaviours in the locals of their practices.
This study also highlights that surfers have a strong disposition for surf tourism, as already reported in the literature (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013;Butts, 2001), because 80% of respondent surfers reported that they have already made a surf travel in the past, and the majority (90%) have propensity to take a travel to surf in the future. This data, together with the average length of surfing trips and the average amount spent per day during the travel, allowed to reinforce that surf tourism is an increasing tourism sector able to generate an important economic impact.
Examination of the destination choice shows that the higher valued surfing destination attributes are related with surfing natural conditional (e.g., variety of places to surf and good waves quality), fact that can be explained because surfers are generally in constant quest for the perfect wave and surfing spots (Barbieri & Sotomayor;Butts, 2001;Ponting, 2009;Ponting & McDonald, 2013). On the other hand, surfing infrastructures and culture ambience (e.g., local surf schools/surf camps) are the less valued attributes probably because individuals of our sample are experienced surfers with autonomy (probably with their own equipment) that want to improve their skills and who do not need to purchase surfing services (e.g., equipment renting). Results of this study also show that, overall, the serious surfing items were classified with high scores (M=5.320), as already reported in other studies (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013), demonstrating that surfers present the six serious leisure qualities, especially related with benefits, career and identity. In turn, this allows reaffirming that surfing can be considered as a serious leisure activity.
Results of statistic tests indicated that the socio-demographic characteristics are not good predictors of serious surfing qualities as already mentioned in other studies (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013). On the other hand, results show that the six serious surfing qualities are good predictors of the surfing profile, in surfing experience and surfing frequency. The positive correlation between career with surfing experience (number of years surfing) and surfing frequency, and between perseverance and surfing frequency demonstrates the high commitment need for surfers attain skills and knowledge to master the waves (Butts, 2001;Ponting, 2008) to achieve a (sense of) career progression. This data is important for surfing destinations with overall good natural conditions for surfing throughout the year (Portugal is a good example) as they can benefit from those conditions as a competitive advantage to capture frequent surfers who wanted to advance their skills. In turn, a negative correlation was found between effort with surfing experience and surfing frequency, and between identity with surfing experience, counteracting previous studies among surfers (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013). These results should be interpreted with caution and can be explained by the fact that the more experienced surfers do not need to make a great effort (e.g., I'm willing to spend time and money in training for surfing techniques) because they already present those surfing techniques to master the waves, and they do not need to present (a perceived) higher identification with surfing (e.g., I believe no other leisure activities can replace surfing) than the less experienced surfers. On the other hand, for those who present higher perceived effort (e.g., I'm willing to purchase surfing books and video tapes to enhance my surfing techniques) the surfing frequency is lower, while for those who present less effort the surfing frequency is higher.
Contrariwise to other studies (Barbieri & Sotomayor, 2013), results from this investigation show that the six serious surfing qualities are good predictors of surf travel behaviour, especially in past surfing trips, willingness to travel in the future, and future destinations. In this regard, career is a good estimator of past surfing trips, willingness to travel in the future, and future destinations; ethos is related to the willingness to travel in the future; effort is a good predictor of past surfing trips and future destinations; identity is related with future destinations and; benefits is also a good estimator of past surfing trips and future destinations. Moreover, results also show a correlation between seriousness of responding surfers and surfing destination attributes, in surfing infrastructures and cultural ambience, hospitality and touristic facilities and surfing natural conditions. Career is related with hospitality and touristic facilities and with surfing natural conditions; ethos is related with surfing infrastructures and cultural ambience and with hospitality and touristic facilities; effort is related with surfing infrastructures and cultural ambience, hospitality and touristic facilities and; benefits is related with surfing natural conditions. These results are able to give important information for the decision making process about where surfing activities should occur. Data related to the travel in the future and future destinations are important especially for those destinations that can offer high surfing natural conditions, allowing to attract those surfers who are expecting for high benefits and who want to progress in their surfing career.
This study also has some limitations, the first being the representativeness of the surfing population as a whole, because the data was collected by accidental sampling and an internet survey. The second limitation is the small size of the sample (n=200) which, despite being sufficient to develop an exploratory study, presents some restrictions in terms of considering an applied methodology, because the number of dimensions in partitioning the task is extremely high. Additionally, it should be recognized that although the questionnaire was validated in two languages (Portuguese and English) problems appears for the non-Portuguese and the non-English native speakers. For these reasons, these results must be interpreted with caution, because participants do not represent the general perception of serious surfers; the results should be taken as indicative and hypothesisgenerating for further investigations. Future studies are necessary, with increased sample size, and using other sampling and data collecting methods which allow a higher representativeness of (national and international) individuals who surfs in Portugal, to further examine the influence of the seriousness of surfing across geographic regions. Furthermore, surf tourism should be investigated from other perspectives. For example, surfers' segmentation enables managers to decide which surfers groups are most attractive to them based on the strengths and resources of the respective destination, and determine which aspects of the destination product should be highlighted in promotion materials.