Mangroves And Ecotourism: Ecological Or Economical?

by Ahmad Mahdzan Ayob

4. Valuing Tourists' Satisfaction From Ecotourism

What is the satisfaction or “utility” to be derived by tourists and visitors to see these swamps? Can it be valued?

People spend money in buying goods or services because they derive satisfaction from such purchases. The same is true for travels and recreation. The tourists have spent a considerable sum of money to make the travel to a site; he or she of their entire party must pay for transportation, accommodation, food, and entrance fee. In return for these expenditures they expect to enjoy (or gain utility from) the visit, by indulging in acts that give them satisfaction – swimming, diving, snorkeling, bird watching, sun-bathing (not for locals perhaps!), gazing at beautiful and unique scenery, fishing, trekking, etc.

If one is interested in finding out whether visitors have enjoyed their visit to a mangrove site, a simple survey can be conducted among a sample of the visitors. Several aspects of the visit can be evaluated, such as the quality of the interpretation session, the friendliness of the tour guide, punctuality of the organizers in the various schedules, quality of food served during the trip, the entrance fee charged, opportunities to ask questions, clarity of the answers, etc.

The main purposes of such a survey are to identify strengths and weaknesses of a service provider and then to capitalize on the strengths and rectify weaknesses for future tourists. Level of satisfaction can be measured on Likert scales and summative ratings computed. One can relate the ratings with demographic variables such as age, gender, education level, ethnicity, income class, etc. Establishments, such as hotels, restaurants, besides the universities, continuously carry out research on visitor satisfaction.

If one is interested to go further as to put a dollar value to the site, there are two major methods to do it, the details of which will not be dealt with in this paper. One is the individual travel cost method (ITCM) and the second is the contingent valuation method (CVM) (see Garrod and Willis, 1999). The first method involves survey of visitors to find out how many visits have they made to the site, how much they have spent on transportation, food, accommodation, time taken to arrive at the site, socioeconomic characteristics, etc. The idea is to trace a demand curve and then try to compute “consumer surplus” which reflects the sum total of the value of the site.

The CVM uses a different approach and asks visitors how much they would be willing to pay (WTP) or contribute to “restore” a site from state A (degraded) to state B (improved to a certain degree), or to maintain the environment in its present pristine state. The assumption is that, without government intervention, which will require public expenditure, the site will deteriorate due to the heavy use by visitors. This approach looks only at the “use-value” of the site and its facilities. Knowing the total number of visitors to the site and the average WTP, the total use value can be computed.

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