Entrance and Activity Fees (Tourism)

1.   Understanding Entrance and Activity Fees  

1.2         Stakeholders

Tourism in PAs and other natural sites – and therefore entrance and activity fees – involve a wide range of stakeholders including government, private tourism companies, and individual PA visitors. The key groups of stakeholders involved are outlined below, along with their roles and motivations for involvement.

Regulatory entity/ies: The government entity/ies mandated by the law to regulate and govern entrance and activity fee systems at national and sub-national levels may include the ministry responsible for environmental policy, laws, regulations, monitoring and evaluation; the ministry responsible for making budget allocations to PAs (the principal source of PA funding; Flores & Bovarnick 2016); and government or parastatal entities responsible for helping to market PA tourism at national, regional, and local levels.

Protected area authority/ies or partners: Depending on the model of PA management, the authority might be a government entity, a parastatal agency, an NGO, a private company, a social enterprise[1], a community-based organization (see details of each below), or two or more of these groups working in partnership or under the auspices of an agreement. The majority of PAs are public, or under a Public-Private Partnership (PPP), but fees are also implemented in Privately Protected Areas.

  • Government entities: PA management may be the responsibility of local, state, or national government and often involves specific sub-departments or parastatal agencies (see below) at a combination of different levels. Different PA types are often managed by different government entities. For example, in Tanzania, national parks are managed by Tanzania National Parks, game reserves and wildlife management areas are managed by the Wildlife Division/Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority, and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area has its own designated management authority (Spenceley, Rylance & Laiser 2017).

  • Parastatal agencies: Some countries have assigned the management of PAs to parastatal (also called quasi-governmental) agencies for improved management efficiency (Eagles 2002).  These public-sector organisations tend to manage their own budgets, can capture and spend revenue, can contract directly with staff and partners, and thus have greater flexibility than government to establish, capture, and spend revenue streams from entrance and activity fees. An example is South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Nature Conservation Service, which became a parastatal, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, in 1998 (Motau & Wale 2018).

  • Non-governmental organizations (NGOs): In many countries, local or international NGOs have taken on management roles for PAs including direct management (management concessions), co-management with government or local communities, or simply providing technical support.  Where PAs or other sites are managed directly by NGOs, they would establish, capture, and mostly have the ability to spend entrance and activity fees. In other circumstances, NGOs are partners that provide technical support and represent community or other interest groups in discussions on entrance and activity fees.

  • Foundations: There are some cases where foundations have a direct or important indirect role in PA management, finance and related fees.  As compared to NGOs, foundations are more typically comprised of smaller memberships (sometimes a single donor) and focus on a particular PA.   All of the protected areas in each of the six Dutch Caribbean islands are managed by legally independent foundations that have been separately established for each island. In other parts of the world there are also foundations who manage a particular park.  For example, the foundation STINAPA Bonaire manages two PAs in Bonaire, one terrestrial and one marine (DCNA 2014).

  • Private companies: Companies may be directly responsible for, or partners in, PA management. They typically seek to maximize profit and minimize costs, but they may also take an active role in promoting a PA or other site and thus may seek to negotiate for lower entrance fees. Some private companies are social enterprises and may act like a hybrid between a private company and an NGO.

  • Community-based organisations: Some PAs are under systems of community-based management, which involves the participation of local communities with current or historic ownership or use rights over those PAs (e.g. see Namibia – Naidoo et al. 2015). They will usually seek to maximize tourism revenues and protect their resources, but often require government approval for fee adjustments.

Service provider(s): Government entity, private company, community-based organisation, or NGO that operates a nature-based recreational activity for which the fee is charged (see motivations above).

Local communities: Local people may seek employment and business opportunities from tourism and can experience other positive or negative impacts in and around their local area. A sustainable tourism operation in or around PAs can generate substantial job and other livelihood opportunities for local communities, but it is important that the views and concerns of community stakeholders are built into tourism management plans (Leung et al. 2018).

Tourists / protected area visitors: Both foreign and domestic tourists are generally willing to pay to use PAs and participate in nature-based recreational activities.  Research indicates that visitors’ willingness to pay will increase if they understand the positive impacts that entrance and user fees have for conservation and when the tourists are informed that the fees will be used primarily for conservation of visited sites (Leung et al. 2018, Peters & Hawkins 2009). Good communication to these primary stakeholders is essential, in part for instilling this knowledge that increases willingness to pay, and can, therefore, be financially rewarding (see entry on Volunteer Tourism and Donations).

Private companies: Beyond involvement in PA management or tourism service delivery, private companies may have other economic interests in PAs (e.g. resource extraction, hospitality). For example, this may include hotels and cruise lines, which are not necessarily service providers for nature-based recreation, but in many cases can facilitate the collection of fees. Their engagement can be motivated by the fact that their visitor numbers and satisfaction can be positively affected by the existence of well managed PAs.