Recreational Value of Erawan National Park, Kanchanaburi Province

Abstract

The objective of the study was to assess the recreational value of Erawan National Park, Kanchanaburi province by a zonal travel cost method. A software program was employed for data analysis and the outputs were represented in terms of the frequency, percentage, maximum, minimum, average and a regression equation, at a significance level of 0.05. Data were collected by employing a designed questionnaire to interview 634 tourists.

The results of the study indicated that 50.32% of the respondents were female, their average age was 29.40 years, most were Buddhists (96.06%), their educational level to the bachelor’s degree was 44.95%, most of them were students (29.18%) and their average income was 16,254.86 baht/month. The surveyed visit was their first trip (50.00%) with relaxing the principal objective of the majority (95.58%), while they received relevant information from their friends/cousins (70.03%), most recreational patterns were one day trips (69.09%) with a family group (50.63%) and the average number of people in each group was 7.37. Personal cars were mostly used for transportation (78.55%). The demand for recreation was inversely related to travel costs and the regression equation developed representing the relationship between the number of people visiting per population of 1,000 (Q_h) and the average travel cost per trip (Tc_h) was Q_h = 7,128,530,301Tc_h^{– 2.968} with a determination coefficient (R²) of 0.914, which was significant at the 0.01 level. The recreational value of this national park was 206,331,138 baht per annum while the recreational value under sustainable management conditions was 6,309,820,734 baht. The findings could be used as guidelines for allocating optimal budgets for natural resources conservation, research and education in tourism and recreation.

Keywords:  recreation, valuation, Erawan National Park