Valuing recreational services of the national forest parks using a tourist satisfaction method

Abstract

Estimating the economic value of ecosystem services has become one of the most fertile areas in ecological economics. In this paper, we propose a novel method of using a tourist satisfaction model to evaluate the recreational services being embedded in forest ecosystems. We establish a functional relationship between tourist satisfaction and recreational attributes based on the survey data of China National Forest Parks. The results indicate that each recreational attribute considered enables the generation of a significant amount of tourism welfare for tourists, whereas tourist congestion was found to be a negative contributor to tourists’ satisfaction. Reducing congestion from the current level is the most valued recreational attribute for tourists, and the willingness to pay for it is as high as CNY 623.18 (USD 92.29) per visitor per trip. Additionally, local and nonlocal tourists display a divergent degree of preference for the recreational attributes and their levels of willingness to pay.