Travel cost method
The travel cost method (TCM) was developed by Clawson and Knetsch (1966) following an initial suggestion of the plausibility of the technique by Hotelling (1949). Thee method is based on the premise that the cost of using recreational sites or tourist areas can be used as a proxy measure of visitors’ willingness to pay and thus their valuation of those sites. It has been applied to the demand for boating, fishing, forest visits, hunting and even international tourism. Even if visitors do not pay to gain entry to a site, they have incurred expenditure either implicitly or explicitly in travelling to it, which could be used as a measure of(or at least a lower bound to) their valuation of that site. Travel and on-site time can be perceived as an implicit cost, while explicit costs include travel, petrol or public transport fares, entry charge and expenditure on site. Whether on-site and travelling time should be incorporated into the estimate of total cost is a point of debete in the literature ( Smith and Devouges, 1986; Chevas et al. 1989). For site to which the majority of visitors walk, valuing the time they take is the only measure which can feasibly be used. This might suggest that on-site time should be the true focus of the debate. If it is decided to include on-site travelling time it may be difficult to assign a value to it. The opportunity cost, in terms of forgone earning or leisure time which could have been spent doing something else, might be estimated. This aspect has been addressed in chapter 2 and 3 in considering the income leisure trade-off in the tourism demand.
Studies employing the travel cost method almost exclusively consist of those for visits to rural recreational site such as important area of high scenic value, forests, lakes, mountains or watercourses. These applications can be categorized according to whether they use an individual, zonal or hedonic formulation of the travel cost model, or a combination of all three.