the monument, are valued by domestic visitors and would encourage higher visitation
rates.2
To our knowledge, this is the first application of the travel cost method to date to
study domestic visitation rates in a transition economy in southwestern Asia. The method
has been used previously to assess the use values of an urban museum (Martin, 1994), of
attending performances at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester (Forrest et al.,
2000), of visiting the historic city of St. Mary, Maryland (Poor and Smith, 2004), and of
four instances of cultural tourism in Spain (Bedate et al., 2004). All in all, Pearce et al.
(2002) point out that the majority of the studies that estimate the monetary value of
cultural heritage sites and cultural goods (see Navrud and Ready, 2002) have employed
contingent valuation, thus relying on stated preference methods, and indeed Mourato et
al. have used contingent valuation to elicit the willingness to pay for the conservation of
monasteries in Bulgaria.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the study
sites, and section 3 the questionnaire and sampling plan. Section 4 describes the data.
Section 5 presents the travel cost method and the econometric model of the demand for
trips to the four cultural heritage sites. Section 6 presents the model of trips to the four
sites under the current conditions and under hypothetical conservation programs. Section
7 concludes.
2 The travel cost method is only capable of measuring use values, and thus cannot capture non-use values.
(Non-use values are those of people that do not visit the monuments, but wish to conserve them in their
own right, for future generations, and in the event they should wish to visit them in the future.) Evidence
that Armenian nationals are willing to pay for the protection of cultural heritage sites, even if they do not
currently visit them nor plan to do so in the future, comes from a companion contingent valuation survey
(Alberini, 2004).