METHODOLOGY Visitor Spending Patterns and Survey This project assumed that the spending patterns of state park visitors varied from other traditional tourism activities. To better capture spending patterns, this study surveyed all guests that reserved a site location at any of the state parks between April 1, 2020, and September 11, 2020. Although a guest may have stayed at a park more than once during the summer, they were only sent one survey invitation and were requested to respond to the most recent experience. The total number of qualified guests to complete the survey was 39,156, and the total number of respondents was 8,397, with a completion rate of 21.4 percent. The distribution of the survey was by email. All qualified guests were sent an email on October 26, 2020. Follow-up emails were sent on November 2 and November 5 to only the visitors that had not responded to the previous emails. The number of survey responses varied by park, with smaller ones receiving proportionally less completed surveys. Due to the low number of responses to a few state parks, the spending patterns were averaged across the entire system; however, the study used variations in expenditures based on the type of activity. Since 2020 contributed to an unusual higher visitor demand due to COVID-19, this study created an average impact based on attendance between 2015 and 1019. Using the pre-pandemic average should be used only as a baseline. This study did not ask predictive questions on their future travel expectation. There are already signs that tourism travel has remained higher in 2021; however, it is too early to know if the level of aggregate demand has permanently shifted. Economic impacts were also created for 2020, which will allow a community to gauge how the growth added additional value to a regional economy. The study does recognize that the surveyed population group did not capture spending patterns from day visitors or those that do not spend the night at a campsite or cabin. Creating an intercept survey was beyond the project’s scope and too difficult to implement during the pandemic. After reviewing the survey expenditure data, this study used a simplifying assumption that spending patterns collected would be used for both day and overnight visitors; however, for day visitors, both other lodging and all spending outside the forty-mile radius were removed. The effective visitor day expenditure (expenditures not spent at the state park) was reduced from $22.42 to $15.53, a 31% reduction. To further check for the reasonableness of that estimate, the study compared the average spending patterns with six other recent impact studies that used different approaches to measuring day and multi-day tourists. When accounting for inflation, the values generated here were in line with or below the other estimates.
Vendor Survey The Kansas State Parks have minimal staffing and provide very little direct services to guests. Instead, the state parks depend on the private sector to provide enhanced services like fishing guides. The relationship with the vendors is symbiotic, and each gains value from the relationship. In order to measure the economic value and dependence of the vendors, a survey was developed similar to the structure of the visitor instrument. To determine the population of the vendors to be surveyed, Kansas State Parks requested each park to provide a list of firms within their region along with contact information. Due to the limits of the project scope, this study only surveyed locations with an identified email address. The state parks identified 382 firms with a qualified email address. The initial survey was sent on April 5, 2021. Follow-up reminders were sent on April 12 and April 14 to vendors that had not completed the questionnaire. In total, there were 96 completed responses with a response rate of 25 percent.
Impact Analysis and Modeling METHODOLOGY
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