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Technological developments have changed the way humans interact with places and how they share information about their experiences. This information can be curated to investigate different aspects of how people and communities interact with the environment they live in. This study presents an economic valuation of use-value of recreation enjoyed by visitors at Lodhi Garden, Delhi using a modified version of Individual Travel Cost Method called Crowdsourced Travel Cost Method. It also illustrates how Instagram is a viable data source for application of Crowdsourced TCM as an alternative to Flickr which has a limited demography. Algorithms to estimate the user’s home location were also developed based on available data and then further used to impute missing socio-economic variables. It demonstrates how voluntarily uploaded geographical-information can be utilized for policy decisions and valuations of ecosystem services. An individual single site travel-cost demand function is generated and estimated using truncated Poisson regression, resulting in mean consumer surplus per user per visit between Rs. 29.4 and Rs. 62.5 and an annual consumer surplus of Rs. 27,762.28 based on a sample of 203 unique users.
Key Words: Travel cost method, Geotagged photographs, Social media, Economic valuation, Recreational ecosystem services.
