Abstract
Recently, simple, natural, and relaxing rural tourism has gradually attracted more and more tourists in Taiwan. Sinpu is a small Hakka town with a beautiful landscape, unique delicacies, and distinctive traditional family shrines and clan temples. If its rich resources can be integrated with the local culture to develop rural tourism, additional value can be added to the local resources. This can therefore bring in huge tourism income and benefits. This study uses the travel cost method (TCM) to evaluate the overall leisure benefits of Sinpu's leisure resources. TCM cannot directly evaluate the leisure benefits of a single location with multiple purposes. Therefore, TCM is combined with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to evaluate the leisure benefits of Sinpu's three leisure resources (i.e. leisure agricultural resources, historical and cultural monuments, and local delicacies). The present study also uses TCM combined with contingent behavior (CB) to evaluate the influences of the many annual festivals and events held on Sinpu's leisure benefits. As shown in the results, the leisure benefits of tourists' visiting Sinpu in 2012 were NT$4,254 per person per visit, NT$14,421 per person per year, and NT$532 million in total for a whole year. By AHP calculation, the CS value of leisure agriculture resources is NT$202 million; the CS value of historical and cultural monuments is NT$138 million; and the CS value of local delicacies is NT$191 million. Assuming that there are festivals held in the coming year, the leisure benefit is NT$5,630 per person per visit, NT$23,590 per person per year, and NT$704 million in total for a whole year. Compared to 2012, the CS value increases by 32.3%. Therefore, promoting rural tourism for Sinpu along with holding festivals can attract tourists and increase the yearly leisure benefit.