Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

In present research was tried to analyze and compare the degree of Iran’s cutie’s development from approach of attraction factors of foreign sport tourists that for accessing to this objective was selected five cities Tehran, Isfahan, Kish, Mashhad& Urmia (as the cities hosting the major international sports competitions in Iran) for sample. After gathering the factors attracting the foreign sports tourists from the valid scientific resources and through the interviews with prominent professors in sports, they were categorized in four groups: 1) Infrastructural factors, 2) Social and cultural factors, 3) Managerial and organizational and 4) Natural and non-natural attractions. Considering these factors, a questionnaire containing 19 questions was designed based on Likert scale and offered to 32 subjects from the sample in each of the studied cities (total 160 people). The resulted data from the questionnaires were analyzed by Numerical Taxonomy method and the final results showed that considering managerial and organizational factors, Mashhad; natural and non-natural attractions, Isfahan; and considering infrastructural factors and Social and cultural factors and also all factors, Kish have the more suitable conditions in attracting the foreign sports tourists in compare with other cities. Of other important results from this study was the lack of adequate infrastructure for sport in all studied cities, and solving this problem can be considered as the most important step in developing sports tourism in Iran.

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