A cross-model comparison of travel time inclusion techniques in recreational fishing demand analysis

Incorporating travel time into recreational demand analysis is a much debated topic. The aim of this paper is to contribute to discourse surrounding the travel cost method by analysing data from a bass angling tournament, the Amatola Bass Classic, held annually in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Firstly, data collected from 64 respondents were used to test the goodness-of-fit of four models: the Standard Poisson, the Zero-Truncated Poisson, the Negative Binomial and the Zero-Truncated Negative Binomial. These models were then utilised to gauge the difference between two standard ways of treating time, by including it both as a separate parameter and as an intrinsic part of travel costs. The data were found to be overdispersed, pointing to a greater level of reliability in the Negative Binomial Models. Using all four models it was shown that the incorporation of time into the overall cost of the trip produced results which were better able to explain the amount of trips taken by anglers than those model specifications where time was included as a separate parameter.