An overview of factors impacting sport tourism development: a case of Zanjan Province, Iran

Nowadays, the sports and tourism enjoy a complementary interrelationship that directly influences the economy of the nations. In addition, sport tourism is, nowadays, considered as the most profitable and lucrative industry of the world. Moreover, it may affect all social strata, economically and politically. Therefore it is needless to express that much more attention should be focused to the industry through clear-cut guidelines and policies, visions and constructive plans in this connection. To this end, in this paper, the writers scrutinize and suggest guidelines for sport tourism progress and development in Zanjan province from social, economic and cultural viewpoints. This is an applied research conducted as field study. In this study the statistical. Sample is divided into 2 groups: 1) Experts including physical education teachers, cultural Heritage and physical education department employees and,2) Customers including different Sportsmen/women travelling to Zanjan province. The research tool is a 43 item researcher-prepared Questionnaire in Likert scale whose reliability and validity were confirmed by a board of University professors. We applied demographical and inferential statistics to process the data. The chi-square results indicated that there was a significant relationship between both Experts and customers `perceptions on sports tourism development in Zanjan province.