Investigating the Role of Indigenous-Local Sport Offerings in Guilan Tourism Development Based on A'WOT Integrated Model

The utilization of Guilan's indigenous-local capital and heritages is considered as an effective factor in diversifying sport tourism attractions, promoting economic prosperity and employment, and defining strategic priorities for sport tourism development.

In a applied and descriptive-analytical study, the supply of indigenous sports sports in Gilan province was identified and then the internal and external influencing factors on the development of tourism and sports were collected.By interviewing 10 sport tourism specialists and distributing the questionnaire among 132 sport and tourism professionals in Guilan and provincial sport tourists, who were selected based on purposive, convenience and snowball sampling, the most important factors were identified as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Then, strategies were formulated into four groups of SWOT matrices using these factors and SWOT analysis. Finally, strategies were compared and ranked using paired comparisons in the AHP hierarchical analysis.

Geographical location, diverse natural attractions and indigenous-local ancient sports were the most important strengths for developing sports tourism in the province and lack of sport tourism infrastructure and lack of necessary cooperation between trustee organizations and local community were the most important weaknesses.Emploing and revitalizing and preserving the local capital and heritage of the local-indigenous sport tourism were the most important opportunity; and the elimination and neglect ion of cultural customs as well as the gradual degradation of natural resources were reported as the most important threats to provincial sport tourism from the statistical population perspective.

Indigenous-Local Sport Tourism Offerings in Guilan, as a cultural and social capital have a growingfunction of introverts and extroverts at the micro and macro levels, but so far they have not been properly exploited. In order to plan and implement future programes for the sport tourism development and use these capitals, the first strategic priority is the defensive strategy in which the vulnerability removal of the study area and the use of effective strategies are emphasized.