Entrance and Activity Fees (Tourism)

1.   Understanding Entrance and Activity Fees

1.4          When is it Feasible and Appropriate?

Entrance and activity fee systems should be both feasible and appropriate for the socio-political, economic, environmental/ecological, and financial context. Key factors are as follows (Lindberg 2001; Eagles 2002; Leung et al. 2018):

  • The decision to charge fees should be driven by appropriate management objectives – such as visitor management, cost recovery, generation of profit, or generation of local business opportunities.

  • The socio-political dynamics of the country underpin fee acceptability (e.g. in some countries, people may not view it as appropriate to charge citizens fees to access public land).

  • There should be a clear legal framework for implementation of entrance and/or activity fees and guaranteed return of a percentage of fee revenues to PA management and adjacent communities – or at least the political will to enact new legislation (see 2.3.5 for details). This legal reform can be lengthy process.

  • The level of investment required will affect how appropriate a fee system is. Costs depend on the current stage of development of a site and its capacity to develop, implement, and monitor the impact of tourism fee mechanisms. Investment may be required to cover additional salaries for PA rangers and staff skilled in financial administration, marketing, and conservation; installation and maintenance of required infrastructure (e.g. ticket sales booths); and costs associated with training, security, marketing, and research to establish optimal pricing structures.

  • Market demand, which depends mostly on a site’s uniqueness and location, is critical for feasibility. In less popular sites, activity and entrance fees may not cover investment and running costs.

Activity fees can be charged either instead of or in addition to an entrance fee. Entrance fees are the most commonly used mechanism to generate revenues from tourism for PAs, since they can be relatively straightforward to establish (Leung et al. 2018). It is usually more cost-effective and acceptable to tourists to charge a single entrance fee rather than multiple small activity fees. But, in MPAs and very large terrestrial PAs with multiple points of entry, it can be more practical to charge fees at points of activity (Font, Cochrane & Tapper 2004). Although very rare, in some countries, legislation currently prohibits PAs from charging entrance fees. For instance, it is not currently legal to impose fees for entry to any publicly-owned conservation area in New Zealand, but fees may be set for the provision of PA facilities and services, and for tourism concessions (Leung et al. 2018). This type of open access for PAs is rare and generally limited to developed countries where government budgets are adequately covering PA management financing needs.

It should be noted that tourism itself is not appropriate in all circumstances.  Proper zoning may be required to help exclude certain highly sensitive areas from tourism pressures, and some PAs may be too environmentally or culturally sensitive to support any level of visitation at all. For example, in Chiribiquete National Park in the Colombian Amazon, only overflights within carefully controlled flyways are allowed. Visitors are not allowed to enter the park on foot or by boat to prevent resource impacts and, more importantly, to avoid contact with undocumented, voluntarily isolated indigenous tribes living deep within the jungle.