Compare methods

	Recreation Demand Travel Cost Model	Tourism Demand Elasticity Modeling
Field	Tourism Economics	Tourism Hospitality
Family	Regression model	Regression model
Year of origin	1966	1994
Originator	Harold Hotelling (concept); Marion Clawson & Jack Knetsch (operationalization)	Geoffrey I. Crouch
Type	Revealed-preference demand model for recreation site valuation	Econometric demand-elasticity estimation
Seminal source	Clawson, M., & Knetsch, J. L. (1966). Economics of Outdoor Recreation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press for Resources for the Future. ISBN: 9780801801211	Crouch, G. I. (1994). The Study of International Tourism Demand: A Review of Findings. Journal of Travel Research, 33(1), 12-23.
Aliases	Recreation Demand Estimation, Zonal Travel Cost Model, Individual Travel Cost Model, Clawson-Knetsch Method	Tourism Income Elasticity, Tourism Price Elasticity, Elasticity of International Tourism Demand, Tourism Demand Sensitivity Analysis
Related	3	4
Summary	The recreation demand travel cost model values a recreation site — a national park, beach, lake, or heritage attraction — by exploiting the fact that visitors reveal how much the experience is worth to them through the cost they incur to get there. Although most such sites charge little or no entry fee, people from farther away must spend more on distance, time, and expenses, and they visit less often as a result. By relating visit frequency to travel cost across visitors or origin zones, the analyst traces out a demand curve for the site and recovers the consumer surplus that visitors enjoy — a money measure of the site's recreational use value. The approach was made operational by Marion Clawson and Jack Knetsch in Economics of Outdoor Recreation (1966), building on Harold Hotelling's earlier insight, and it remains the workhorse revealed-preference method for nonmarket recreation valuation.	Tourism demand elasticity modeling estimates how responsive tourist demand is to changes in its key drivers, above all source-market income and the price of travel. The income elasticity measures the percentage change in demand for a one-percent change in income, and the price elasticity does the same for price; both are recovered as coefficients in econometric demand models, most simply a log-linear regression where the coefficients read directly as elasticities. Geoffrey Crouch's mid-1990s surveys of the international tourism demand literature consolidated decades of such estimates, showing that tourism is typically income-elastic — a luxury that grows faster than income — and price-sensitive, with values that vary systematically across markets and methods. Later meta-analyses, such as Peng, Song, Crouch, and Witt's, quantified that variation across hundreds of studies.