Visitors' Willingness To Pay For An Entrance Fee : A Case Study of Marine Parks in Malaysia

This study estimates how much visitors are willing to pay for first, to reduce the damages due to crowding effect; second, to reduce the damages due to inland development, of three marine parks in Malaysia; Payar, Redang and Tioman Marine Park. For the crowding effect issue the respondents were presented with a hypothetical situation in which the park authority wanted to reduce the damage to the corals by limiting the number of visitors to half the number who came in 2000. The reduction in the total number of visitors is to be achieved by imposing an increased entrance fee. For the inland development issue, an increase in the entrance fee is intended for the authority to hire more people to monitor and enforce rules, to treat sewage and to implement coastal zone management and planning. Estimation using the double-bounded dichotomous choice method found that the willingness to pay (WTP) per person per visit to moderate the environmental impact of inland development is RM23.79, lower than the WTP to reduce crowding, RM31.59. When both data were combined, we found that the WTP of foreign visitors was higher than the WTP of locals at RM39.11 and RM19.52.