Basic steps of travel cost method

The basic steps of the travel cost method are as follows:

1. Data collection: Collect tourist information data, including payment information, stay time, etc. These data can be obtained through questionnaires and statistics of the tourism sector.

2. Establish a demand curve: based on the tourist information data, establish a demand curve representing tourists' willingness to pay for travel. This can be achieved by regression analysis and other methods, taking the cost of tourists as the independent variable and the number of visits or consumption of tourist destinations as the dependent variable.

3. Estimate the value: According to the demand curve and other relevant information, estimate the value of the tourist destination. For example, you can calculate the total amount that tourists are willing to pay at different travel costs and add them up to get the total value of the destination.

4. Sensitivity analysis: analyze the impact of changes in travel costs and other factors on the value of the destination, so as to understand the economic sensitivity of the destination.

5. Evaluation and improvement: compare the estimated value with the actual observation value to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the travel cost method. If necessary, model parameters and methods can be adjusted to improve the accuracy of estimation.

The travel cost method has the following limitations:

1. First of all, it depends on consumers' willingness to pay for travel costs, but consumers' willingness to pay may be affected by many factors, such as personal preference, income level and travel purpose. The change of these factors may lead to the instability of the estimation results.

2. Secondly, the travel cost method usually assumes that consumers' willingness to pay is directly proportional to their utility, but this may not be the case, which may lead to the deviation of the estimated results.

3. In addition, the travel cost method has some difficulties in data collection and processing, which requires a lot of time and resources. Finally, the travel cost method only considers the direct costs of tourists, such as transportation and accommodation, but ignores the indirect costs of tourists, such as time cost and opportunity cost, so it may underestimate the total value of tourism resources.

4. Although the travel cost method can estimate the economic value of tourism resources to a certain extent, it needs to carefully consider its limitations in practical application and make a comprehensive evaluation with other methods.