The Recreational Value of Bama in China: One of the Five World’s Longevity Townships

Abstract

The recreational value of Bama Area in China is estimated to be 2.73 hundred millions dollars in 2009 via a revisionary travel cost method (TCM) in this paper. To make the estimation more applicable to the case of Bama, one of the five top longevity townships in the world, this paper adopts a new partition method and revises two calculation principles. Firstly, the conventional zonal travel cost method is amended to divide tourists by their travel cost instead of geographical or administrative zones. Secondly, the cost of tourists for different duration in Bama is calculated respectively. For short-term tourists, travel cost is estimated with the opportunity cost coefficient 1/3. The opportunity cost of the long-term tourists is replaced by their daily board and lodging cost in Bama. Thirdly, the total recreational value only covers special visits to Bama but excludes multi-destination visits. With the three modifications, it is plausible that the recreational value of Bama estimated in this paper reflects more objectively the resource characteristics and real value of the site.