Document Type : Research Paper
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Abstract
The purpose of this research was to study the factors affecting to brand equity of sport tourism destinations from the perspective of sport tourists. Statistical society were all of the demostic and foreign sport tourists. Statistical sample were 576. The research instrument was a questionnaire that had been used in Konecnik& Gartner (2007) and Boo et al (2009) survey, with high validity and reliability (α = 0.83) . descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for data analysis and verify the theoretically proposed model and test the separate hypotheses. The SPSS,16 was used to do descriptive statistics and EQS 20, software for structural equation modeling (SEM) . The results showed that all variables have direct influence on brand equity except the variable of awareness. Image has greatest impact on the brand equity of sport tourism destinations. From the perspective of sports tourists, Iranian sport tourism destinations is a safe destination and has a beautiful scenery and nature, pleasant climate and natural sporting attractions. Overall, sport tourists was not loyal to Iranian sport events and sport tourism destinations and Iranian sport destination was not one of the preferred destination to visit from the sport tourist’s perspective, because Iranian sport tourism destinations has not a good name & reputation to raise awareness of the tourism destinations and have not a readily available travel information and have not high quality of infrastructure and sport facilities for hosting major sporting events.
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