The Relationship between Perception of Service Quality, Satisfaction and the Intent to Return of Sport Tourists Attending the Derby of Esteghlal and Persepolis

The interaction between service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty has been always a controversial issue. So, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between service quality, satisfaction and the intention to return of sport tourists.
The research method was descriptive–correlation and the statistical sample consisted of 265 tourists attending Tehran’s Azadi stadium for watching a football game between Esteghlal and Persepolis. The research instrument was a questionnaire that had been used in Shonk’s Ph.D. dissertation. The validity was approved by doing exploratory factor analysis and the opinions of sport management experts. The reliability was verified by Cronbach’s alpha method (α=0.89). The SPSS19 was used to do descriptive statistics and exploratory factor analysis. Also, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) were done by LISREL.
The results showed satisfaction didn’t mediate the relationship between service quality and the intention to return of sport tourists. Although, satisfaction had a significant effect on sport tourist’s intention to return, the service quality had greater effect on sport tourist’s intention to return. Also, the influence of service quality on satisfaction was significant.
According to the results, it can be concluded that increasing sport tourism service quality and its related factors increase sport tourist’s satisfaction and their intention to return.