Pacific Northwest Research Station

Title: Reflections on measuring recreation and travel spending.

Author: Stynes, Daniel J.; White, Eric M.

Date: 2006

Source: Journal of Travel Research. 45: 8-16

Description: This article reviews problems encountered in using visitor surveys to measure travel spending. Lack of consistency in question wording, spending categories, and units of analysis makes it difficult to compare results across studies. Spending results can be quite sensitive to a number of data-handling issues, in particular, the treatment of outliers, contaminants, and missing spending data. It is recommended that spending averages be estimated for narrowly defined visitor segments so they can be validated with engineering approaches and common sense. Further research evaluating alternative designs for measuring spending is needed to address a host of methodological issues.

Keywords: recreation spending, visitor sampling, economic impact

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Citation

Stynes, Daniel J.; White, Eric M.  2006.  Reflections on measuring recreation and travel spending..   Journal of Travel Research. 45: 8-16