A Comparison of the Experts and Customers` Viewpoints Regarding the Factors Constraining and Enhancing Sport Tourism Development in Zanjan-Iran

Today, tourism and sport enjoy a complementary interrelationship directly constraining and enhancing 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 investigated and offered guidelines for sport tourism development in Zanjan .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 of whom returned 560 questionnaires. The research tool was a 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.