The relationship between perception of service quality with satisfaction and the intent to return of sport tourists in red-blue derby

The service quality, satisfaction and intent to return have been always considered a controversial issue. So, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between service quality with satisfaction and the intent to return of sport tourists.
The research method was descriptive – correlative and done as a field study. The statistical sample consisted of 265 tourists attending Tehran’s Azadi stadium to watch the football game between Esteghlal and Persepolis. The research instrument was a questionnaire that had been used in Shonk’s Ph.D. dissertation. The face and content validity was verified by the sport management experts and the construct validity was approved by Exploratory Factor Analysis and. The reliability was also 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 that satisfaction didn’t mediate the relationship between service quality and the intent to return of sport tourists. Although, satisfaction had a significant effect on the sport tourist's intent to return, the service quality had greater effect on sport tourist's intent to return. Moreover, the influence of service quality on satisfaction was significant.
According to the results, it can be concluded that development of sport tourism service quality and its related factors increase sport tourist's satisfaction and their intent to return.