Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 2.
Characteristics of visits.
Table 3. Estimated travel cost method (RM) for Ulu
Chepor Recreational Park.
Definitions and coding
Percentage (%)
State of origin
Perak
92.4
Kedah
0.8
Pulau Pinang
0.8
Selangor
4.4
Negeri Sembilan
0.4
Kelantan
1.2
Will visit in future
Will visit again
100
***Significant at 1% level, **Significant at 5% level,
*Significant at 10% level.
Will not visit again
0
Source: Survey (2012)
Table 4.
Comparison of selected functional forms.
a greater intention and desire to venture of visit-
ing the tropical rain forests and recreational parks.
The visitors interviewed were 94 percent Malay, 2.4
percent Chinese and 3.6 percent Indian. In terms
of marital status, 27.2 percent of the visitors were
single and 72.8 percent were married. It is worth
mentioning that the conditions of clean river,
waterfalls and huge rocks in UCRP contribute to
the fact that this location makes a perfect place for
family recreation activity. Furthermore, most par-
ents want their children to enjoy the natural herit-
age such as the scenic beauty of national park and
want to take part in conservation of the rain forest
for future generation. In terms of education level,
most visitors (36.8%) have gone through college or
institute, followed by 35.2 percent university and
27.2 percent secondary school.
Table 2 outlines the characteristics of UCRP vis-
its. Approximately 38.7 percent of the visitors were
first time visitors, while 61.63 percent were repeat
visitors. In terms of the state of origin, majority of
visitors were from Perak, which contributed, 92.4
percent while the rest (7.6%) were from other states
in Malaysia such as Selangor, Kelantan, Kedah,
Pulau Pinang and Negeri Sembilan. The results
show that 100 percent of visitors stated that they
would visit the UCRP again in future.
This shows that there are elements in the UCRP
that attracts and make them intend to visit again
in the future. The main reasons for the visitors to
return among others are ideal picnic and relaxa-
tion spot, green environment surrounded by green
forest that makes this place more serene. This find-
ing is very important for the ecotourism operators
and ecotourism planners in marketing their prod-
ucts and developing marketing strategies.
Note:
a,b,c
Selected functional forms, refer to Eq. 1, 2 and 3.
Table 5. WTP and expected net benefit (RM) for Ulu
Chepor Recreational Park.
The estimated results of travel cost (TC) method
for UCRP are shown in Table 3. All of the esti-
mated coefficients for TC were highly significant
at 1 percent level under the three functional forms
namely LM, SL and DL models.
The elasticity of demand can be estimated
with respect to expenditure (travel cost). In a DL
model, the coefficient of the travel cost estimated
can be considered as elasticity. It explains that for
a 10 percent increase in expenditure, the number
of visit decreases by 6.12 percent which means that
it is inelastic.
The goodness of fit model is shown in Table 4.
In term of R
2
value amongst the three functional
forms, DL model (50.1%) outperforms the SL
(48.7%) and LM (37.1%). This is supported by the
F-value where DL model shows the highest value
(15.661).
3.3
Willingness To Pay (WTP) and expected
net benefit
Based on the estimation results, equivalent WTP
were calculated using regression analysis at expend-
iture and level of visit (see Table 5). The calculated
mean of WTP ranged from RM2.30 per visit, and
expected net benefit of RM33,120. Calculating the
area below the cumulative distribution function
yields the mean WTP estimate for each respondent.
3.2
Multiple-regression results
All OLS regressions were conducted using Statisti-
cal Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.
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