Remote tourism and forest management: a spatial hedonic analysis

Abstract

This analysis examines the impacts of forest harvesting and other angling site attributes on anglers' willingness-to-pay for trips to Ontario's fly-in fishing sites. A hedonic model that relates the prices charged by fly-in remote tourism enterprises to the attributes at and surrounding fishing lakes forms the empirical application. Important attributes examined are forest harvesting, forest fires, angling quality, and camp improvements. The hedonic model employed a spatial simultaneous autoregressive model that corrects for spatial lagged dependency in the data. This correction was found to have a significant impact on the marginal prices of the attributes examined. The analysis shows that forest harvesting has a negative albeit weak relationship on the prices charged by tourism operators for remote fishing trips.