Explanation of Effective factors in the Spatial Behavior of Religious Tourists in Mashhad

Identifying the behavior of tourists and explaining the behavior of the researchers has been one of the important topics of tourism, and the current goal is to evaluate the factors on the behavior of domestic and foreign tourists of Mashhad with the geographical region.

This research is a descriptive-analytical survey with the aim of developing the regulation and information in the field and using a researcher-made questionnaire. Statistically, there are domestic and foreign tourists, and based on the recorded statistics, the number of incoming tourists in 2018 was 22,025,167 and the number of foreign tourists was 1,239,926. According to Cochran's formula, there were 384 Iranians people as a statistical sample for tourists and 384 people were obtained as a sample of foreign tourists’ statistics and were distributed among the statistical population through random sampling method.

According to the findings of the questionnaires, it was found that the behavior pattern of tourists shows that foreign tourists travel a greater distance from Razavi Holy Shrine (65 km) for tourism elements available around Mashhad city. Therefore, their behavioral pattern is scattered. This is while domestic tourists are mostly located around the Holy Shrine and up to a radius of 30 kilometers from the Razavi Shrine, and their behavioral pattern is clustered around the Shrine of Imam Reza (A.S.).

The results obtained from the analysis of the questionnaires were determined; the economic factor with an average of 3.7 has the greatest impact on the behavior patterns of tourists, and the environmental factor with an average of 2.7 has the lowest value, and among the factors affecting the spatial behavior patterns of foreign tourists, the highest average is related to the socio-cultural factor with 3.3 and the lowest is related to the physical-infrastructural factor with 2.09.