A Comparison of the Experts and Customers’ View points Regarding the Factors Influencing Sport Tourism Development in Zanjan-Iran

Today, tourism and sport enjoy a complementary interrelationship directly affecting the nations` economy .Also, sport tourism is, nowadays, considered as the most lucrative industry worldwide. In addition, it may affect the all social strata economically and politically. Thus needless to say that much more attention should be directed to the industry through clear-cut policies, visions and constructive plans in this regard. To this end, in this paper, the authors investigate and offer guidelines for sport tourism development in Zanjan from economic, social and cultural perspectives .This is an applied research carried out as field study. The statistical sample is divided into 2 groups:1)Experts including physical education teachers, cultural heritage and physical education department employees and,2)Customers including different sportsmen/women traveling to Zanjan. The research tool is a 43 item researcher-made questionnaire in Likert scale whose reliability and validity were confirmed by a board of university professors. We applied descriptive and T-student statistics to describe the demography and determine the differences between both groups` viewpoints regarding sport tourism development in Zanjan.