Role of Destination Familiarity in Branding of Iran as a Sport Tourism Destination

The study is to investigate the role of destination familiarity in the branding of Iran as a sport tourism destination. The statistical population was consisted of all foreign tourists traveling to Iran. 360 people using convenience sampling method participated in the study as the statistical sample. The data gathering instruments were destination familiarity (Liu et al., 2018), destination brand image (Andersen et al., 2018) and behavioral intention (Wu et al., 2018) questionnaires and data analysis was structural based on equation modeling. The validity (content, convergent and divergent) and reliability (load factor, composite reliability coefficient, Cronbach's alpha coefficient) of the questionnaires indicated that they were of good reliability and validity. The results showed that destination familiarity can significantly affect the brand image of the destination with the path coefficient of 0/83, and the image of the sports tourism destination can subsequently affect the behavioral intention of the sports tourists with the path coefficient of 0/68. Also, destination familiarity can directly affect behavioral intention of the sports tourists with the path coefficient of 0/63. In other words, by enhancing the familiarity, destination image and tourists’ behavioral intentions will affect positively. Totally, these findings indicate the role of destination familiarity in the branding of Iran as a sports tourism destination.  Based on the findings, it can be suggested that if Iran's sport tourism destinations seek to increase their share of the global sports tourism market, then they should pay special attention to the role of familiarity in branding Iran as a sports tourism destination.