Estimating visitor use and economic contributions of National Park visitor spending

This chapter provides an overview of the National Park Service (NPS) methods for estimating visitor spending and calculating economic contributions of visitor spending in terms of jobs supported, wage and labor income, and total economic activity. The Visitor Spending Effects model combines visitor spending patterns and trip characteristic data with visitor use data to estimate total visitor spending. Economic contributions measure the total economic activity within a regional economy stemming from visitor spending, and include the effects of spending by both local visitors who live within gateway regions and non-local visitors who travel to NPS sites from outside of gateway regions. The Social Science Program collaborates with individual parks to develop visitor counting instructions that contain the procedures for measuring, compiling, and recording required visitor use data. Visitor surveys are used to collect the essential visitor spending and trip characteristic data necessary for developing spending profiles to represent distinct visitor spending patterns for each park.