The role of sport tourism service quality in sport tourist's intent to return

Sport tourism is a service industry and in the service industry customer retention is more important than attracting new customers. Also, high quality service and products is one of the most important factors affecting customer retention. Therefore, the aim of this study was to survey the role of sport tourism service quality dimensions in sport tourists’ intent to return. The research method was descriptive – correlation and the statistical sample consisted of 265 tourists attended to Tehran’s Azadi stadium for watching a football game between Esteghlal and Persepolis in March 2011. The research instrument was a questionnaire had been used in Shonk’s P.HD. dissertation. The validity was approved by doing Exploratory Factor Analysis and opinion of sport management instructors. The reliability was verified by Cronbach’s alpha method, α=0/89). The SPSS16 was used to do descriptive statistics and exploratory factor analysis. Also, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) were done by LISREL. The result showed although “access quality”, “sport complex quality” and “contest quality” had significant influence on “sport tourists’ intent to return”, the effect of access quality was more than the others. So, it can be concluded all sport tourism service quality dimensions have different effects on sport tourists’ intent to return and for giving high quality services some factors should be more considered.