A Heritage Travel Cost Tool: Non-market Benefits of England's Historic Sites
England’s historic sites enrich people’s lives in ways that cannot be fully captured using standard metrics such as ticket prices or visitor numbers. The Heritage Travel Cost Tool highlights the importance of maintaining access to historic sites, because their true contribution to society extends well beyond market-based revenues.
Building on previous research, Valuing Historic Attractions Using Travel Cost Methods and Mobile Data, Historic England applied its innovative Travel Cost Model to over 100 historic sites across England. We created this interactive map that shows the additional benefits people gain from visiting historic sites.
This work forms part of the Culture and Heritage Capital (CHC) Programme, which aims to improve how the value of culture and heritage is understood and represented in public decision-making. The Travel Cost Tool combines data on visitor travel patterns, time, and spending to estimate the value people place on access to heritage sites beyond what they pay for admission.
Why does it matter?
The Travel Cost Tool contributes to Historic England’s wider effort to develop consistent and transparent measures of cultural value in line with HM Treasury’s Green Book and the Culture and Heritage Capital framework. By presenting complex economic findings in an accessible and interactive format, this tool provides a foundation for incorporating heritage value into Social Cost-Benefit Analysis.
Key Insights
The analysis from the Heritage Travel Cost Tool confirms that historic sites provide substantial benefits to the public, beyond those captured using orthodox economic approaches. The additional benefits visitors derive from these visits (the so-called ‘consumer surplus’) is equivalent to approximately one-third of the ticket price on average.
Importantly, the Heritage Travel Cost Tool uses an innovative approach with ‘big data’ that is also able to capture the benefits of visiting free-to-enter sites which are found to provide significant public value. The findings show that both large, well-known destinations and smaller local or free-to-enter sites provide meaningful economic and cultural value.
Heritage Travel Cost Tool
Each site on the map contains information derived from the Heritage Travel Cost Tool analysis.
When you select a site, the pop-up panel provides information including:
- Total consumer surplus generated by visits to the site
- Estimated consumer surplus per visitor (£)
- Total travel costs incurred by visitors
- Visitor number range
- Ticket price range
- The site’s managing organisation
These figures represent modelled estimates of the additional value visitors receive from accessing heritage sites, beyond what they are willing to pay to travel to and access these sites.
You can navigate the map by moving across the country or zooming in to specific areas. Each heritage site is represented by a point on the map. Selecting a point/ hovering over it opens a panel displaying the results for that site.
The tool can be used to:
- Explore heritage sites across England and view the estimated consumer surplus associated with visits
- Compare the consumer surplus generated by different sites
- Examine how travel costs and visitor travel distances relate to visitation patterns
- Explore differences between sites with different visitor numbers, ticket price ranges, and managing organisations
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