Valuing forest park attributes by giving consideration to the tourist satisfaction

Despite the economic valuation of forest park resources has triggered a great deal of interest to the research community and park management, up to now no attention has been paid to the effect of psychological factors such as tourist satisfaction, which could potentially play a considerable role in contributing to the park resource valuation. This article attempts to fill this niche by carrying out a study on the economic valuation of the Xian-Ren-Tai National Forest Park in China, taking consideration of the tourist satisfaction. In the process, the choice experiment survey was used for data collection. Then, both conditional logit (CL) and random parameter logit models were used in parameter estimations to examine the factors that could potentially impact on the tourists’ willingness to pay. Results indicate that the tourists attach the greatest importance to the park’s natural environment and traffic conditions, and yet the level of tourists’ satisfaction on their tourism experience plays a big part in explaining the valuation results. Tourists who uphold a high level of satisfaction tend to pay more for the park attribute improvement than those with less satisfaction ones. The estimated compensating variation of the overall current park attributes has reached ¥184.95 per person per trip, of which 12.83% shall be attributable to the tourist satisfaction.