Qualitative Exploration of Effective Factors on Investor Attraction in Sport Tourism Destinations; Case Study, Ardabil Province

Tourism development in every country requires investment and without investing in infrastructure and superstructure plans cannot be expected to develop tourism.The purpose of present study was to discover a theoretical structure & deliver a comprehensive pattern about investment of sport tourism destinations in Ardabil province. This study is a practical one. It's worth mentioning that our study was conducted in a new field & no comprehensive investigation has been done which covers overview of investment about sport tourism destinations. Thus, this research was conducted using qualitative approach. Statistical population of this study consisted sport management experts, tourism and economy experts, department of cultural heritage & tourism managers, department of Sport & youth managers, provincial government managers, municipality managers, parliament members & tourism agencies managers of Ardabil province. Mixed of some theoretical sampling methods, for example Snowball sampling, Politically important cases sampling, Critical case sampling, Criterion sampling were utilized to select the samples of this study, qualitative interviews were conducted to gather information in our study. Data and codes reached theoretical saturation following 21 interviews. Statistics analysis were conducted systematically by using thematic analysis method in Nvivo 12 Plus software. Finally, 48 codes were identified after analyzing data which were classified in 4 main classes based on their importance. The results of present study provide the politicians and planners of this province with adequate approaches to expedite the process of developing tourism destinations economically in Ardabil Province.