Recreation Visitor Spending Profiles and Economic Benefit to Corps of Engineers Projects

Abstract

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (CE) is the largest federal provider of water-based recreation. It manages over 450 water resource development projects throughout the United States. These lake and river projects provide significant recreation opportunities and benefits to visitors and local residents, accommodating over 385 million person visits in 1999.The purposes of this research are to develop visitor spending profiles and to estimate local and national economic effects of spending by visitors to CE projects. A visitor survey was conducted in the summer of 1999 through early 2000 at 16 CE projects across the nation. The survey was administered by the Engineer Research and Development Center of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Park, Recreation and Tourism Resources at Michigan State University, with assistance from managers and staff at all 16 participating CE projects.Segmented spending profiles were developed that can be tailored to project-level spending based on regional visitation data. Total recreation visitation was estimated by using information gathered from this study and from the Natural Resource Management System database. Economic effects of CE visitor spending were estimated by applying visitor spending and use data to regional economic multipliers generated from economic input-output models. These results provide a database for further analyses and improvements in future studies like these.DISCLAIMER: The contents of this report are not to be used for advertising, publication, or promotional purposes. Citation of trade names does not constitute an official endorsement or approval of the use of such commercial products. All product names and trademarks cited are the property of their respective owners. The findings of this report are not to be construed as an official Department of the Army position unless so designated by other authorized documents. ContentsPreface vi SF298.El List of Figures

Regional Growth and Beaver Lake: A Study of Recreation Visitors

“…3 Therefore, the impact analysis includes only the spending of new visitors that stay overnight in a hotel, motel, etc, or on campgrounds (more on each category follows in the next section). Past ARCE studies have focused on measuring the economic contributions of ARCE water recreation projects rather than the economic impacts of increasing visitor spending (Chang et al, 2003). The terms 'visitors', 'visits' and 'person-trips' are interchangeable throughout the remainder of this report but, in the impact analysis, these terms refer to visitors from outside the area.…”

“…This study uses two data components from ARCE: (a) visitation data for Beaver Lake; and (b) spending profiles for six segments of visitors (Chang et al, 2003). 4 To estimate the spending profiles and the visitation data, ARCE conducted surveys in 1999 and 2000 at 16 ARCE projects and used data from the Natural Resource Management System (NRMS) database.…”

“…This segment also spends the least per visit, only US$13.43, of which only US$7.16 is captured in the region. The segment with the lowest number of visits is OVN/boater, with only 19,768 visits; however, this segment also spends the most per visit at US$94.27, of which US$66.71 is captured, and these visitors typically stay for a longer visit (Chang et al, 2003) than day-user visitors (Tables 1 and 2).…”

“…Data published by ARCE is used independently and does not represent endorsement by ARCE or cooperation with ARCE. The study objectives here and those of Chang et al (2003) are different. 5.…”

“…6. For a detailed description of how the visitation data and spending profiles were estimated, see Chang et al (2003). 7.…”