Agritourism is an example of a growing and important industry to rural communities in the United States seeking to leverage interest in their natural resource, agricultural, and other heritage assets. We use survey data and a flexible travel cost model to estimate the part-worth consumer surplus (CS) values of Western US agritourism trips for different regions, activities, and traveler types. Given the rural nature of agritourism may require interested travelers to come from long distances, we also pay particular attention to and compare travelers’ marginal and cumulative travel costs to evaluate the impact on CS estimates. Results indicate that trip and traveler heterogeneity, if unaccounted for, may lead to misinformed policy and management decisions.

对于美国农村社区来说，农业旅游业是一个正在发展且重要的行业，以寻求利用其自然资源，农业和其他遗产资产的利益为例。我们使用调查数据和灵活的旅行成本模型来估算美国西部农业旅游针对不同地区，活动和旅行者类型的部分价值消费者剩余（CS）值。鉴于农业旅游的乡村性质可能要求有兴趣的旅行者来自远距离，因此我们也特别注意并比较旅行者的边际和累积旅行成本，以评估对CS估计的影响。结果表明，旅行和旅行者的异质性（如果无法解释的话）可能导致错误的政策和管理决策。