Tourists’ Willingness to Pay Increased Entrance Fees at Mexican Protected Areas: A Multi-Site Contingent Valuation Study

Brian Witt

doi:10.3390/su11113041

Abstract

It can be challenging to set protected area entrance fees without information on how much visitors are willing to pay. It is particularly difficult for agencies managing multiple sites to set fees without conducting surveys at each location. In order to examine how willingness to pay estimates would vary across sites with distinctive profiles, 877 visitors at five Mexican protected sites (Calakmul, Cobá, Palenque, Sian Ka’an, and Yum Balam) were interviewed through double-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys. The results suggest that visitors would be willing to pay higher entrance fees, with mean maximum willingness to pay estimates of 2.8–9.8 times current fees, ranging from US$15.70 to US$25.83. Visitor demand was found to be relatively inelastic, with aggregate fee rises of 26% estimated to result in a 5% decrease in visitation. These results suggest that there is room to raise revenues through moderate fee increases without a concomitant drop-off in visitation.

Highlights

A common revenue-generating strategy for protected areas is charging a fee for admission to the site
Mexican protected areas face many of these same challenges, with declining funding allocations from the federal government and entrance fee revenues unable to make up the difference [13,14,15,16,17,18]
As there is considerable variation in visitor numbers between the sites and relatively uniform sample sizes, all aggregated willingness to pay estimates and regression variables were weighted to reflect the relative distribution of visitors

Summary

Introduction

A common revenue-generating strategy for protected areas is charging a fee for admission to the site. Many other protected areas, in mid- and lower-income countries, set fees below the cost of providing the necessary infrastructure for tourism, despite a lack of consistent alternative funding sources. This may be done to encourage tourism, through fear of competition from other sites or countries, or a lack of information about what visitors would be willing to pay to visit the site [1,6,8,9,10,11,12].

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion