Prioritization of the Most Important Common attractions in the Development of Sport Tourism of Iran's Northern Provinces

The first step to develop and manage sport tourism destinations is to identification and prioritization of available resources. The purpose of this study was prioritization of the sport tourism attractions on developing sport tourism in Iranian Northern provinces.
112 subjects (20 sport management experts, 92chairman, assistants and experts of universities, administrations of physical education, cultural heritage and municipalities of three provinces) were selected as the sample and answered to the questionnaire designed by the researcher. The face and content validities of this questionnaire was confirmed by experts and its reliability, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated in a guide survey (α=0.92). For analyzing data, Kruska Wallis, u-man- whitney, Touki and Anova tests were used in a significant level α≥0.05.
Findings showed that attraction of the sport competitions and events, water sports, hill climbing and nature tourism, mountain climbing and cave climbing, hiking, warm water and nature therapy, hunting, and winter sports, respectively are the most important factors in developing sport tourism in the studied provinces
According to the research findings, it is suggested that authorities of the related organizations pay more attention to holding sport events for attracting more sport tourists and sport administrators collaborate with other relevant departments to invest more on sports attractions such as the beach sport and hiking.