Modelling Recreation Demand Using Choice Experiments : Using Swedish Snowmobilers Demand for Groomed trails

This paper is concerned with the use of the choice experiment method for modeling the demand for snowmobiling . The Choice Experiment includes five attributes, standard, composition, length, price day card and experience along trail. The paper estimates the snowmobile owners’ preferences and the most preferred attributes, including their will-ingness to pay for a daytrip on groomed snowmobile trail. The data consists of the an-swers from 479 registered snowmobile owners, who answered two hypothetical choice questions each. Estimating using the multinominal logit model, it is found that snow-mobilers on average are willing to pay 22.5 SEK for one day of snowmobiling on a trail with quality described as skidded every 14th day. Furthermore, it is found that the WTP increases with the quality of trail grooming. The result of this paper can be used as a yardstick for snowmobile clubs wanting to develop their trail net worth, organizations and companies developing snowmobiling as a recreational activities and marketers in-terested in marketing snowmobiling as recreational activities.

The effects of attitudes and personality traits on mode choice

We hypothesise that differences in people's attitudes and personality traits lead them to attribute varying importance to environmental considerations, safety, comfort, convenience and flexibility. Differences in personality traits call be revealed not only in the individuals' choice of transport, but also in other actions of their everyday lives-such as how much they recycle, whether they take precautions or avoid dangerous pursuits. Conditioning on a set of exogenous individual characteristics, we use indicators of attitudes and personality traits to form latent variables for inclusion in an, otherwise standard, discrete mode choice model. With a sample of Swedish commuters, we find that both attitudes towards flexibility and comfort, as well as being pro-environmentally inclined, influence the individual's choice of mode. Although modal time and cost still are important, it follows that there are other ways, apart from economic incentives, to attract individuals to the, from society's perspective, desirable public modes of transport. Our results should provide useful information to policy-makers and transportation planners developing sustainable transportation systems.