Tennis Travel, Holidays & Tourism – Ultimate Tennis Tourism Guide

Visit the Tennis Hall of Fame, Newport in the Rhode Island.

Did you know that sports tourism is nearly a $8 billion industry that takes various forms along the lines of either watching, following or actually participating in a sporting event? Tennis travel and tourism is a form of fast-growing sports tourism whereby fans from all around the world travel to a city or a region where a particular and usually famous tennis tournament is being played.

Are you a casual fan who loves watching sport and are also interested in travelling? Or a fanatic who supports his player and/or team through thick and thin and follow them wherever he/she/they play? Or do you like travelling to different parts of the world to compete in amateur sporting events? Or even love collecting memorabilia and visiting other places to compare it with what you got. Or a hardcore traveller who loves planning their travels around sport? You are the quintessential sports tourist!

What are the types of Sports Tourism?

According to many researches and papers, sports tourism is of three main types, Sports Event Tourism, Active Sports Tourism and Nostalgia Sports Tourism. Each of these is explained in brief below.

Sports Event Tourism:

Wimbledon Travels, Tickets & Tourism

This is the most common form of sports travel and tourism. A sports event like the FIFA World Cup or Olympics or Wimbledon in tennis is played on a regular basis and fans make plans to visit the city where this event is played to follow it live from the grounds or the courts.

Active Sports Tourism:

Some sports fans love to travel to cities where they can actively participate in the events themselves. This can further be divided into tourism by active participants and hobbyists. Active participants are amateur participants who work on their sport in their free time and visit cities where sports tournaments for these amateurs are played. On the other hand, hobbyists engage in the sport and travel to take part in these sports as a leisure.

Nostalgia Sports Tourism:

As the name suggests, sports tourism based on Nostalgia is the type of sports travel which fans do as a way to re-visit some of the sporting attractions from around the world. There are many halls of fame or museums around sporting events or sports itself and it makes for excellent following. Visiting a football stadium during the off-season on a guided tour like they have in Chelsea and Arsenal to name a couple of them or tennis’s International Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island.

Tennis Travel & Tourism:

So, now that you have a general idea of what entails sports tourism, we can move on to talk specifically about tennis tourism and the whats and hows of it. Following on from here, we will look at the various forms of tennis travel and the specifics around it, including the best cities to travel to, which are the tennis tournaments to follow, how to buy tennis tickets and the things to do while you are in a city for your tennis tourism.

Best Places to Visit During a Tennis Travel

If you are new to the tennis calendar, tennis tournaments are played throughout the year at various level starting from the first week of January. At the highest level, ATP and WTA competitions finish up by the first week of November before players go on a seven to eight week break, although with the introduction of the season-ending Davis Cup, even that could for a toss for those top players participating in that tournament.

Some of the biggest tennis tournaments, which also attract travellers from all parts of the world, include Wimbledon that is played in London and the US Open in New York, two cities that is frequented by tourists throughout the year anyway.

The Australian Open in Melbourne and the French Open in Paris are the two other majors that is a crowd favourite. On the other hand, there are Masters competitions and the ATP World Tour Finals, which are second in that rung of the top tennis tournaments but equally loved by travelling fans from around the world.

Some of the cities you could look to travel for these competitions are Indian Wells and Cincinnati in the USA, Monte-Carlo in Monaco, Madrid in Spain, Rome in Italy and even Toronto, Montreal and Shanghai.

The best part about watching tennis in these cities and some of the other lower-ranked tournaments is you can do a lot more than just following your favourite sport. Cities that have so much going on other than tennis you would be spoilt for choices and need your time there!

Below is our definitive guide on how to combine tennis and travel, with regular updates on how to buy tickets for the tournaments, places to visit in those cities, hotels to stay at among others.

Melbourne Travel for Australian Open

Melbourne is often called the sporting capital of the world and not without reason. Not just tennis and the Australian Open, Melbourne is known for its cricket, rugby, football (or soccer) and various other sports at every level.

To go with sports, Melbourne has some brilliant places to visit during your stay there.

The Australian Open is played in the middle of January these days, which means if you are headed there, you better brace yourself for some strong sun and heat, with temperatures rising to over 40 degrees centigrade at times. (it was so hot at one of the editions of the Australian Open that Novak Djokovic shared a cheeky picture of an egg being fried by it court-side).

Find below all the information related to the 2019 Australian Open if you are a traveller. It includes tickets for the Australian Open, places to visit in Melbourne and economical hotel options close to the Australian Open venue during January.

Paris Travel for French Open

The second Grand Slam of the year is played in a place called the Roland-Garros in Paris, a city of love, and a city that has one of the largest footfall of tourists each year. The capital of France, and with a population of more than two million, it is famous for its monuments that include the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral and Louvre Museum among many others.

But we are talking tennis and we are talking of arguably the toughest Grand Slam on the circuit, one that has eluded the likes of Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker and Pete Sampras and even Roger Federer has won it just once. Rafael Nadal has been a dominating force on clay and such has been his hold here that by the time we have mentioned how many titles he’s won at Roland-Garros, he might have added another one.

So if you are looking to travel to Paris this coming French Open, get all its information in the exhaustive French Open guide below.

London Travel for Wimbledon

Wimbledon is arguably the most famous tennis tournament in the world and one whose tickets are seldom easily available. But if you have been fortunate enough to lay your hands on the Wimbledon tickets using any one of the methods mentioned below, then London is an equally awesome city worth exploring.

As a tennis fan and a tourist, we recommend you spend at least a week in London exploring the sights, sounds and smells of the city that stands by the river Thames. London is one of the greatest cities in the world, leading in the fields of arts and commerce, entertainment and fashion and most vitally tourism.

And when you are looking at tourism, London is also famous for the topic on hand – sports and sports tourism. Wimbledon aside, you could look at watching competitive football that includes the Premier League, the Champions League, FA Cup and a host of lower-rung football leagues at notable stadiums like the Wembley, Emirates and Stanford Bridge among others, Test match & ODI cricket and T20 Blast at Lord’s and The Oval or rugby.

New York Travel for US Open

Often called the city that never sleeps, New York City has always been in the running for the Sports Capital of the World title, one that Melbourne holds. New York City isn’t too far behind though, what with the plethora of high-level sporting events that are played here.

You name the sport, and you can be rest assured it’s played in New York City at some or the other level, be it the famous ones like baseball, basketball, American football, ice hockey, tennis and football (or soccer as it’s called in the USA) or the lesser followed ones in the country like auto-racing, cricket, fencing, horse-racing, golf, lacrosse, polo, rugby league and rugby union among others.

Tennis travel and tourism is huge in New York City too. The US Open is the fourth Grand Slam that’s played from the last week of August every year, with men’s singles and doubles, women’s singles and doubles, and mixed doubles competitions played among the others like juniors, wheelchair and legend tennis. The US Open is played at the National Tennis Center, and that’s accessible to tennis tourists whenever there’s no tournament on, and tourists can visit the world’s largest tennis stadium, the 22k-seater Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Here’s more information on everything New York tennis tourism, whether it’s about the US Open tickets or the places that can be seen while in the city and the hotels to stay.