The Impact of Hosting Sporting Events on Sport Tourism Development: A Case Study

Sport tourism is an ever increasing industry recognized as a factor influencing the economic and social restructuring of urban and rural areas in the developing countries .It is considered as a main component of sport –dependent tourism in many countries and recently has attracted much attention as a "domestic market. Hence, the purpose of the present research was to investigate and offer guidelines for sport tourism development in Zanjan from economic, social and cultural perspectives .This was an applied research carried out as field study. The statistical sample was divided into 2 groups: (i) experts including physical education teachers, cultural heritage and physical education department employees and (ii) Customers including different sportsmen and sportswomen travelling to Zanjan. The research tool was a 43 item researcher-made questionnaire in Likert scale whose reliability and validity were confirmed by a board of university professors. We applied descriptive to describe the demography and,T-test and Friedman to test our hypotheses