Desirability of Urban Night Tourism from Tourists’ ViewpointCase Study: Shiraz City Tourists

Tourist destinations and their societies are seeking to find new ways for competition in tourism market; as one of these ways, night tourism has been considered in recent years. Shiraz city with variety of attractions is one of the main tourist destination in Iran and has notable potentials for night tourism development. The aim of this paper was to investigate desirability of urban night tourism from Shiraz tourists’ viewpoints. Research statistical population was those tourists who arrived in Shiraz city in March 2017 and stayed there at least for three nights. Sample size was 400 and needed data was gathered through questionnaire. The questionnaire included three parts including general attributes of tourists, tourists’ viewpoint about nighttime desirability of city environment and tourist attractions, and tourists’ viewpoint about importance of environment and tourist attractions for night tourism development. Statistical methods of Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Friedman test, Mann Whitney test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Simple and multiple regression and SPSS software were applied for analyzing of data and testing hypotheses. Results showed that among urban nighttime environment criteria, the criteria of weather condition and night city beauty were more desirable for tourists. Among different attractions, historical monuments were the most desirable, and nighttime desirability of cultural attractions, gardens and parks, recreational spaces and religious places ranked second. 30.9 percent of variance of tourist satisfaction’ was explained by variances of ‘environment desirability’ and ‘nighttime tourism attractions’, and 54.4 percent of variance of tourist loyalty was explained by variance of tourist satisfaction.