The role of sport tourism service quality dimensions in sport tourist's satisfaction

The sport tourism industry is a service industry, and as such is largely influenced by the quality of the services provided. Also, considering the service quality and satisfaction that are important issues in tourism policy, could be useful for sport tourism development. So, the objective of this research was to determine the effect of sport tourism service quality dimensions on sport tourists’ satisfaction. The research method was descriptive – correlation and the statistical sample consisted of 265 tourists attended to Tehran’s Azadi stadium for watching a football game between Esteghlal and Persepolis in March 2011. The research instrument was a questionnaire that had been used in Shonk’s PhD. dissertation. The validity was approved by doing Exploratory Factor Analysis and opinion of sport management experts. The reliability was verified by Cronbach’s alpha method, α=0/89). The SPSS16 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 the effect of “access quality” (effect coefficient=0/79, T value=4) and “contest quality” (effect coefficient =0/61, T value=2/90) on satisfaction was significant but the influence of “sport complex quality” (effect coefficient =0/06, T value=0/61) on satisfaction was not significant. It can be concluded every dimension of sport tourism service quality has a special effect on the satisfaction of tourists that should be noted.