qdts-camping-options-toolkit

Fact sheet B
Establishing the benefits of a camping
facility owned or managed by local
government
What are the potential benefits?
Numerous benefits can extend from a local government
providing a camping facility to attract visitors to stay
overnight in the region. These may include economic,
social and environmental benefits.
Economic
• Increased income
• Increased employment
Social
• Increased visitor safety by reducing the number
of visitors staying at undesignated campsites
• Improved social fabric or morale of the local
community through interactions with visitors
• Greater means to undertake community projects
(via the increase in expenditure in the region)
• Better facilities for local residents (e.g. visitors
support local cafes and restaurants that as a
consequence have longer opening hours)
• Improved resilience of the local economy
through diversification
Environmental
• Reduced environmental damage from visitor
activities at undesignated campsites including
littering, erosion etc.
• Better control and management of visitor impacts
To complete a CBA, all benefits need to be quantified and
expressed in monetary terms. However, it can be difficult
to quantify some social and environmental benefits.
Market gap and quantifying the economic benefit
of visitor expenditure
The increase in visitor spending provides benefits to
some local businesses and workers. However, this visitor
expenditure is not a net benefit, as it does not account for
resources used by the local businesses in providing their
good and services. Instead, the benefit is the difference
between the visitors’ spending and the cost the local
businesses incurred in providing the goods and services
(i.e. the benefit to the shire is not the amount visitors
spend, but the difference between what visitors pay and
what it costs to provide those goods and services).
Estimating this benefit can be difficult, as the costs of
local businesses in supplying goods and services for
the visitors staying at the camping facility are often not
known. A general percentage of net benefits from visitor
expenditure could be applied where local data is
not available.
There are numerous ways to estimate the economic
benefit of the camping facility. A simple calculation is
provided in Table B.2 as a guideline.
Table B.2 Estimating the economic benefit of a camping
facility (sample)
How many extra visitors will
stay overnight in the region
if the camping ground is
provided (per year)?
On average, how many nights
will these visitors stay in the
region?
On average, what will each
of these visitors spend in the
region per day (excluding
spend on campsite fees)?
Visitor expenditure in the
region due to the camping
ground
Net benefit (%)
Calculation
[Insert
value]
[Insert
value]
[Insert
value]
A x B x C
[Insert
value]
Reference
(see Table B.3)
Net benefit D x E F
A
B
C
D
E
Fact sheet B
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