Impacts of Visitor Spending on Local Economy: Colonial National Historical Park, 2001

Stynes, Daniel; Sun, Ya-Yen

The purpose of this study is to document the local economic impacts of visitors to Colonial National Historical Park (COLO) in 2001. Economic impacts are measured as the direct and secondary sales, income and jobs in the local area resulting from spending by park visitors. The economic estimates are produced using the Money Generation Model 2 (MGM2). Three major inputs to the model are: 1) Number of visits broken down by lodging-based segments, 2) Spending averages for each segment, and 3) Economic multipliers for the local region Inputs are estimated from the Colonial National Historical Park – Jamestown Island Visitor Survey, National Park Service Public Use Statistics, and IMPLAN input-output modeling software. The MGM2 model provides a spreadsheet template for combining park use, spending and regional multipliers to compute changes in sales, personal income, jobs and value added in the region. Colonial NHP poses several difficulties for estimating economic impacts. While the historic sites managed by the National Park Service are of considerable historic significance, Colonial Williamsburg is the primary attraction in the area. Busch Gardens Williamsburg, Jamestown Settlement and a host of other area attractions also compete for the visitors time and money. Given current information, it is not possible to isolate the unique contribution of Colonial NHP to economic activity in the area. The Colonial Parkway and the two distinct NPS sites at Yorktown and Jamestown also pose problems for counting visitors, as many visitors will be counted more than once during a stay in the area. Our approach will therefore be to apply the MGM2 model first to all spending by park visitors in the area. We then estimate the National Park’s contribution by treating most visits to Yorktown and Jamestown Island as essentially day trips, attributing roughly the equivalent of a half day’s spending to these National Park visits. One night of lodging is counted for 10% of National Park visitors staying overnight in the area. This captures spending by overnight visitors whose primary purpose is to visit the NPS sites and assumes that roughly 10% of overnight visitors spend one extra night in the area in order to visits Colonial NHP sites.

Impacts of Visitor Spending on Local Economy: Colonial National Historical Park, 2001

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