摘要：
Weather information has become increasingly popular in people’s daily life in Taiwan and used in many applications. For tourism, weather information is one of the most important factors affecting users’ travel plan. Weather information is especially important for tourism in outlying islands because the weather condition could be the key for tourists to make their trip successful. We utilize contingent valuation method (CVM) and Choice Experiment (CE) to elicit the economic value of weather information for tourism in Penghu, the largest outlying island of Taiwan. To investigate the economic value of weather information, this study has conducted 444 in-person surveys in the domestic airport in 2022. The results show that tourists travelling to Penghu pay more attention to weather information such as rainfall, temperature, and tides, and the weather information that respondents care about in each recreational theme is also different. The average willingness-to-pay(WTP) is $165.7 NTD per month (about $5.44 USD). We estimate the annual aggregate economic value by weather information for tourism in Penghu is about $1.02 billion NTD ($3.34 million USD). Moreover, we have found that for the Penghu island tourists the priority improvements of weather information they request are: (1) to improve the accuracy of short-term forecasts; (2) to improve the accuracy of long-term forecasts; (3) to improve the weather forecast resolution of long-term forecasts; (4) to shorten the time-interval of forecasts. Assume all those improvements can be implemented, the estimates of additional annual social benefit potential will be approximately $1.59 billion NTD (about $5.22 million USD). Tailored weather information makes it easier for tourists to apply weather products/services. An early warning information can help tourists to adjust their travel plan as soon as possible. Most of the value of weather information comes from preventing tourists from making wrong travel decisions at their costs.
