Visitors’ Preferences and Willingness to Pay for the improvement of Eco-Tourism Destinations in Protected Forest Areas in Kerala

Abstract

The study is designed to assess the visitor’s preferences towards the protection of nature-based tourism destinations in the protected forest areas of Wayanad in Kerala. The tropical evergreen forests of Wayanad, lying on the foothills of Western Ghats, provide a range of unique experiences and attractions, such as hiking trails, nature camps and wildlife viewing that attract visitors from all over the world.  These destinations under the protected forest areas are relatively well protected and conserved but the economic value of these services is not fully captured or recognized, and therefore not properly valued. Developing countries are increasingly acknowledged the potential of tourism as a critical source of revenue. A more feasible approach includes identifying the benefits of the services provided by them and attach monetary values to it so that they can be comparable with that of other services which can be traded in the market.  Economic valuation provides a way to measure the direct and indirect economic benefits of forest ecotourism services, including employment and income generation; revenue from park fees and taxes, and the multiplier effects of tourism spending on local economies.Identification of such benefits and the quantification of them in terms of a monetary units is not a simple task to perform.  Alternative mechanisms are developed to capture the price signals for environmental goods and services. A brief review on the studies related to the recreational value of forests and the contingent valuation methodology adopted for assessing the visitors’ preferences and the willingness to pay measurement are presented here. The Contingent valuation scenario is described and a Double-Bounded CV question is framed.  The parametric WTP estimates for both SBDC data and DBDC data are calculated using the log-logistic and log-normal models.  The non-parametric estimates are also calculated for the scenario.