Sports tourism and new opportunities in developing countries: A case study of sport tourism in the province of Ardebil

Abstract

Sport tourism plays an important role on developing economy and it can create tremendous opportunities for developing non-industrial regions. It is also the fastest growing sector in the global travel industry and generates hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The proposed study of this paper surveys different factors influencing sport tourist activities. The study distributes a questionnaire among 100 randomly chosen tourists in the province of Ardebil, Iran and the results are analyzed. The results indicate that Cronbach Alpha is 87.7 percents, which validates the reliability of our results. Based on the results, the region has tremendous opportunities for sport tourism such as water treatment. There are other opportunities in the province such as beautiful nature, historical monuments, mountains, etc. Unfortunately, the survey reveals that people are not aware of these places and governmental media must spend more efforts on introducing these opportunities.

Keywords

• Sport tourism
• Tourism industry
• Water treatment
• Hiking