Identifying and prioritizing infrastructures related to sports tourism development in Mazandaran province

Tourism is developing rapidly as a major industry. Development of the tourism industry, especially, sports tourism, is concerned with many factors, one of which is infrastructure. The purpose of this study was to identify and prioritize infrastructures related to sports tourism development in Mazandaran province.  

The research was based on a descriptive-survey method. The statistical population included sport management professors (n = 13), experts and heads of sports associations from Sport and Youth administration (n = 45), and the tourism experts in Mazandaran province (n = 37), who were 95 in total and were selected based on purposive sampling. The tool used to collect data was a researcher-made questionnaire whose face and content validities were approved by sport management professors (n = 15) and experts in tourism (n = 6). Its reliability was also obtained by Cronbach`s alpha and equaled to 0.86. The questionnaire was designed according to the 5-point Likert scale. After distributing the questionnaires to all participants, 83 of 95 questionnaires were returned as completed (n = 83). The factor analysis test was used for the rate of the importance of infrastructures related to sports tourism by inferential analysis.

Finding showed that in the field of infrastructure factors related to the development of sports tourism of Mazandaran province, the development of the infrastructure related to Internet and Information services (β= 0.91) has the primarily importance, while the use of international standards in the presence of sport tourism services (β= 0.62) has the least important.

It should be noted that the development of sports tourism will be possible when all infrastructure and facilitating factors that affect sports tourism are considered and appropriate approaches such as facilitating the optimal use of information and communication technology, active participation of employees at all stages of attracting tourists to providing services, creating standard facilities and equipment for sports, and reinforcing transportation system are adopted for developing sports tourism infrastructure.