Whereas most valuation studies have provided useful insights of protected areas and their benefit
in developing countries, they have typically focused more on benefit sharing than on how the
adjacent local community will benefit from wildlife conservation and also they have typically
focused more on estimating consumer surplus rather than on evaluating user fees as a guide
toward designing improved park pricing strategies which is the focus of this paper. Many of the
visitors to protected areas, such as national parks, are foreign tourists who incur few of the costs
but enjoy many of the benefits stemming from resource conservation efforts. Tourism revenues,
rather than being earmarked for park maintenance or resource conservation efforts, are
frequently merged with other sources of general revenues.
Funding conservation activities in the Serengeti is a big problem which requires revenue
management by national park that will ensure sustainability of the social ecological system.
Serengeti National Park is regarded as one of the major attraction to the foreign tourists. We
applied a twist in the Contingent Behavior (CB) methodology in the context of a developing
country, which has never been applied in literature. We find out that as the entrance fee increases
tourists tend to switch to substitute park which is the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya and
the demand is elastic. In reality, the park agency is inept to charge the revenue maximizing price
because of the competition from other parks, both locally and regionally. Nevertheless, the fact
that we found that the fees could be increased significantly over and above the current fees to
maximize the revenue collection is important.