America’s national parks need more money, and according to a new report, international visitors could be a cash cow.
Levying an extra $25 on every international park visitor could net the National Park Service $330 million annually, according to a December report from the Property and Environment Research Center.
The Bozeman-based nonprofit estimated that such an infusion would nearly double fee revenue for the parks, which are contending with huge lists of deferred maintenance projects, without further burdening domestic visitors.
“We have some of the most amazing sites and … a lot of them unfortunately need help when it comes to stewarding them for future generations,” said Tate Watkins, a managing editor and research fellow at PERC. “…When you’re getting such an amazing experience and literally bucket-list stuff for a lot of people, it seems common-sense to me that people wouldn’t bat an eye at paying a little more.”
The National Park Service currently needs $22 billion for deferred infrastructure projects such as maintaining roads, according to park service numbers aggregated by the report. Utah’s national parks, monuments and recreation areas alone need $387 million.
Plus, parks have seen skyrocketing visitation over the last decade without a concomitant increase in budgets.
“What that boils down to is you’re having to serve more visitors with fewer resources,” Watkins said.
For Watkins, a logical solution to that shortfall is to glean more from certain visitors — those who don’t pay taxes that support the park service in the first place.
International visitors are often charged extra to visit national parks in other countries, Watkins added. For example, visiting the Galapagos Islands costs $100 for foreigners but only $6 for Ecuadorian citizens.
A much smaller fee disparity in America, Watkins said, “would make a huge difference” in funding, especially for iconic spots such as Arches National Park that draw visitors from around the world.
Jason Murray, who works in the international tourism industry, said a surcharge on foreign visitors could impact their behavior in a multitude of different ways.
Many international tourists, he said, tend to visit up to a dozen national parks in a single trip, so even a small fee increase could add up into the hundreds of dollars. That means visitors might curtail their spending in other areas, like eating out and going on guided tours.
Other tourists might simply opt to visit fewer parks.
“You are creating the haves and the have nots just based on the financial expense of going into those areas,” said Murray, who is the president of Southwest Adventure Tours and a member of several international tourism-related boards.
At the same time, Murray said visitors might instead change their plans to see fewer parks but spend more time at each one.
“It might go both ways,” he said.
For Watkins, it’s hard to imagine a $25 surcharge would impact the itinerary of most overseas visitors, as many of them already spend thousands of dollars to visit the U.S.
“I don’t think it would affect visitation at all,” he said.
He added that fee revenues largely support the sites where they’re collected, so increased revenue would proportionally help the parks that see the most international visitors.
That’s important because international visitors can impose extra burdens on parks, Murray said. For example, travelers who are less familiar with local customs and culture can damage infrastructure or drain park resources by, for example, needing more backcountry rescues.
“An adjustment or a fee could be levied [on those visitors] to help offset those expenses,” Murray said.
Still, if a surcharge were implemented today, it likely wouldn’t generate the revenue projected in the PERC report. That report used pre-coronavirus visitation data, and international tourism to the U.S. still lags behind pre-pandemic numbers.
“We’re barely starting to see the recovery start to happen this year,” Murray said. “And it’s a far cry from what it was.”
There would also be some start-up costs to developing a more nuanced fee schedule. Entrance booths would have to adopt more complex protocols and figure out how to, say, charge tour buses that bring in a mix of international and domestic visitors.
But tweaking the system and learning along the way, Watkins said, might be just what the park service needs to solve modern challenges.
“If the initial revenue is going back into making parks better, stewarding them better and maintaining them better, everyone benefits — including the gateway communities,” Watkins said. “I think for the long run it makes sense for everybody.”