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Abstract
Travel cost is used as an auxiliary variable for the price of non-market goods and services. A major issue with this approach is how to calculate the travel distance accurately and decrease the measurement errors. In this study, we use the mean and median of the coordinates of fishing sites in the coastal counties along the Southeast Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, to measure the travel distance of alternative fishing sites and compare it to the conventional method using the mid-point of county-level sites. The willingness-to-pay (WTP) of charter and private/rental boat anglers for one additional catch on a day-trip for Dolphinfish, King Mackerel, and Red Snapper is estimated by nested logit model. Our results indicate that the conventional method overestimates the WTP of charter boat anglers for Dolphinfish and King Mackerel, and underestimates the WTP of private boat anglers for these species.