An Analysis on Tourism Awareness and Destination Choice, Based on the Word of Mouth ( Case Study: Chabahar Port, Iran)

Tourism, which is called a green industry in today's world, is a way to transfer culture and civilization from one society to another; In that process there are many positive economic, social, political, environmental and cultural effects. Every tourism destination offers different products and services to attract tourists. The success of a region in the tourism industry is not only limited to show the unique attractions, but also depends on various factors such as the level of awareness and knowledge about those attractions. The aim of this paper is to determine the level of awareness of tourists with the local attractions and the level of their familiarity with the attractions and its relationship with the frequency of visiting.

The research method is applied in terms of purpose, and descriptive-analytical in terms of research methodology, which was carried out using library-documentary and field study. The statistical population includes all of the people of Chabahar city and tourists who came to visit this city; 382 people were studied using Cochran's sample size method. The field data of the research was collected using a questionnaire and SPSS19 software was used for data analysis and Pearson correlation test was used to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that there is a significant relationship between the level of awareness and frequency of visits and the tourists’ tendency to visit attractions. The level of visit of attractions increases by enhancement of awareness on attractions. The results also showed that the most common way of familiarity with the city attractions is the word of mouth advertising (53.7%).