Demographic characteristics and preferences of sport tourists in Iran

Importance of sport tourism marketing as a field of study in sport tourism has emphasized now more than before. Firsr step in marketing is market segmentation and for this, information about characteristics and needs of customers are of special importance. Researches have shown that indexes like population, age clusters distribution, Income, sex, number of family members, spatial distribution of the population, amount of leisure time, ethnic group, education, activities, interests and attitudes, technical knowledge, buy and use behavior, expectations from product, consumption amount, and also place of residence will affect on tourism behavior and are criterias for market segmentation and selecting target markets. So the purpose of this study was to determine the demographic characteristics and preferences of sport tourists in Iran. The research method was descriptive. The sample of study consisted of 177 Iranian sport tourist and 125 foreigner sport tourists. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect the data (the validity was approved by experienced professors in sport management and its reliability was verified by Cronbachs alpha method, α=0/775). Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data by SPSS software. The results showed that about 60 % of the samples were athlete and most of them were young (27 years in average) and male (%91). Most foreigner sport tourists had come from the neighbors countries to Iran. Although sport tourists had not good salaries, the money they tend to spent for the trip was nearly equal to their monthly income. Educational degree of most sport tourists (53 %) was diploma and lower. First interested area for sport tourism was "sea and other water activities" and first interested media for sport tourism ads was TV. The most important reason for sport tourists travelling was the sport event itself and the favorite season for them was spring. Results showed that sport tourists have specific characters which almost differ from other kind of tourists. So these special characteristics should be considered in planning for attracting them and a marketing planning which targeted on all kind of tourists, can not pull sport tourists to the event place.