Estimating the Economic Values of Mirissa Coast of Sri Lanka Focused on Sea Whale-watching Tourism Using Individual Travel Cost Method

This study focuses on using the Individual Travel Cost Method (ITCM) as a non-market valuation technique to estimate the economic value of sea whale-watching based on coastal and marine tourism in Mirissa, the Southern Province of Sri Lanka where, no previous studies of this kind have been conducted before. An onsite survey in Mirissa beach is inevitable for foreign visitors and tourists to watch sea whale in Mirissa which is a popular hotspot known around the world. The count data models including zero truncated Poisson regression (ZTPR) model and zero truncated negative binomial regression (ZTNBR) model are applied to estimate the consumer surplus (CS) with a sample size of 207. The econometric estimations show that CS estimates per trip per visitor per year in ZTNBR, which avoids the over-dispersion problem that occurs with ZTPR, is $3,634, and for the aggregation of the national level the annual total economic value of foreign visitors for whale-watching in this site in the ZTNBR is estimated to be $556,884,376.