Economic values of Ulu Chepor Recreational Park, Perak: A travel cost approach - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 236

the respondents. This approach was anticipated to
obtain more accurate and complete responses and
the information given was meaningful and able to
produce high quality data.
A total of 250 respondents from diverse demo-
graphic and socio-economic backgrounds were
surveyed. Data were collected at UCRP. Random
sampling of the visitors was done throughout the
day to capture variations in the origin of visitors at
different times of the day. The survey instrument
was pre-tested and question wording was refined
based on the results of a pilot test. The respond-
ent's socio-economic characteristics obtained
include state of origin, age, gender, race, marital
status, education, occupation and income.

Table 1. Visitors' profile ( N = 250).

2.1 The travel cost method
This study adopts the TCM because it is consist-
ent with the consumer demand theory. TCM is the
practical method that estimates actual consumption
of the environment, rather than a hypothetical one.
Three functional forms were used to estimate the
economic model of UCRP visitor demand, which
are the linear model (LM), semi-log (SL) and
double-log (DL). SL and DL models were trans-
formed by taking the natural logarithm of both the
dependent and continuous independent variables.
Advantages of using the semi-log functional form
include minimizing the problem of heteroscedas-
ticity, as well as eliminating the potential problem
of negative trip prediction, which may happen in
linear functional form (Loomis & Cooper, 1990).
The econometric models for the three models are
defined as follows:

Linear Model (LM)

V i = β o + β 1 TC i + β 2 TimeC i

Source: Survey (2012).

+ β 3 INC i + β 4 AGE i + ε (1)

Semi-Log Model (SL)

3 RESULT AND DISCUSSION

ln V i = β o + β 1 TC i + β 2 TimeC i

3.1 Socio-economic profile
This section presents the results of the descriptive
analysis of visitors' socio-economic variables such
as age, gender, race, marital status, educational
level, occupation and monthly household income.
Table 1 depicts the summary of the visitors' pro-
file. Most of the visitors (20.8%) were between 36
to 40 years old, followed by the age group 26 to 30
years old (19.6%).
By gender, the majority of visitors (64.4%) were
male. This finding is in line with Chin Moore, Wal-
lington, and Dowling (2000) that the visitors to
Bako national Park were aged between 16 and 40
(76%). This is because the younger generation has

+ β 3 INC i + β 4 AGE i + ε (2)

Double-Log Model (DL)

In V i = β o + β 1 ln TC i + β 2 ln TimeC i

+ β 3 ln INC i + β 4 ln AGE i + ε (3)

Where V i is thenumber of visit for the past three
year of the i i-th visitor, TC i is the round-trip travel
cost of the i i-th visitor, TimeC i is the opportunity
cost for the i i-th visitor, INC i is the monthly house-
hold income for the i i-th visitor , AGE i is the age in
years of the i i-th visitor. Travel cost consisted of
travelling cost and time cost.