TRAVEL COST METHODS
- Category: Economical
- Subcategory: Economic valuation of ecosystem services; Valuation of environmental goods & societal benefits
- Tool Type: Modeling approaches-Econometric model
- Input data:
- Outdoor visitation patterns for several individuals in the reference population
- Travel cost (distance and time for travelling, fuel cost, bus tickets, etc.)
- Socioeconomic information (such as gender, age, income)
- Output:
- Demand function for the outdoor sites
- Willingness to pay (WTP) for a single visit and/or for some period of time (eg. a month)
- Recreational values associated to changes of sites characteristics (eg. coral cover, frequency of algal blooms etc.)
- Target users: Researchers / Trained practitioners
- Location tested: Lithuanian coast (Curonian Lagoon)
- Level of uncertainty: Confidence intervals can be estimated after the model estimation. Uncertainty is therefore quantifiable and context specific.
- Version: not applicable
- Publication: A Reference documents can be a journal article or an academic book, please contact the tool reference person to discuss this.
- Rights: not applicable
- Difficulty level of implementation: Complex
- Skill required (for method use): Knowledge of travel cost theory and skill in using statistical software.
- Authors: Task Leader:Carlo Fezzi. Authors: Sandra Notaro, Nan Zhang, Marco Tomasi
- Tool contributors:
- Project general coordinator: Jan Marcin Węsławski
- Project Scientific manager: Julie Bremner
- Project manager: Joanna Przedrzymirska-Ziółkowska
- Name: Carlo Fezzi
- Organization: University of Trento
- Email: fezzi@unitn.it
Travel Cost Method (TCM)
The travel cost method is the most established revealed preference approach to estimate the recreational value of natural sites. It can also be used to value other public goods such as museums or cultural attractions. This approach estimates the “consumer surplus” associated with a visit, which represents the difference between the maximum amount a visitor is willing to pay for visiting the site and the actual cost incurred in traveling to the site. In less rigorous terms, it is the net increase in well-being that individuals experience by visiting the site. This well-being can, as usual, be expressed in monetary terms. The travel cost method can be used to value the site access or some specific characteristics of sites, such as the amount of fish biomass or coral cover.
There are two main travel cost approaches: the single-site travel cost and the multi-site travel cost. The single-site travel cost method is simpler to implement, and focuses on estimating the total recreational value of a specific site, for example, a beach, but can be also used to assess the value of a larger area (such as a region with several beaches). The multi-site travel cost method allows estimating the value of multiple, heterogeneous sites within a region, and the simulation of many different and spatially explicit policy scenarios with changes in both site accessibility and environmental quality.
URL / Availability:
- The travel cost method is an economic model; it is not a platform and doesn’t have a website, therefore you don’t need an account to access it. However, it requires both data collection and analysis which can be done using analyzing the data would require the access to some statistics software like R (free) and Stata (a license is required).
- A Reference documents can be a journal article or an academic book, please contact the tool reference person to discuss this