Abstract
Recently urban areas have been advanced in the aspects of convenience, traffic, and cultural environments, but they have faced various problems including environmental issues, traffic congestion, and increasing stress. In contrast, rural areas are in charge of various functions, conservations of natural environments and traditional cultures. Rural life style may be beneficial to urbanites. As urbanites are increasingly interested in leisure activities, such as experiences of tradition cultures and education, safe foods and rural tourism are gaining attention as alternative ways of satisfying their desires. In other words, the rural tourism not only provides urbanites with leisure spaces by playing a role in relations between urban and rural areas, but also acts as a nonfarm income to the rural residents. With the changes of time, the number of current rural experience tourism on a nationwide is increasing and competition among locations is getting intensive. Particularly, despite various rural tourism villages in operation, there is not a standard in the dice for experience cost and accommodation costs. Accordingly, the aim of the study was to estimate urbanites' willingness to pay(WTP) for rural experience tourism and to provide basic data for qualitative growth and revitalization with regard to the tours. The estimated WTP for rural experience tourism was found to be 5,600won for experience, 5,600won for food, 42,000won for accommodation, and 13,000won for purchasing farm products, respectively. This trend could be similarly found (there were slight differences in food cost) on all analyses, such as the research of the current situations of rural tourism villages in Gyeongnam province, the pilot survey and the estimation depending on whether or not urbanites experienced the tours. In other words, the WTP for urban hands-on experience tours estimated by this study is considered highly significant in terms with possibility of its application in the sites. It is concluded that the urbanites' WTP for rural experience tourism obtained by this study will contribute to the setup of standard index of rural tourism, the qualitative development of rural hands-on experiences, and the raise of nonfarm income.
