This study assesses how and in what circumstances tourists’ perceived value of nature-based tourism (NBT) attributes differ among various types of national parks. A novel discrete choice experiment is used employing data collected from 343 international tourists in four national parks in Sri Lanka. We find that the improvements in frequency of large species’ encounters, habitat quality and proximity to encountered wildlife produce greater utility. A surprising finding is that tourists are shown to prefer to spend only a limited amount of time at national parks. They also tend to choose less-visited parks that have large mammals for which they would be willing to pay more compared to those national parks that are more frequently visited. Our article contributes to the empirical evidence that time is a key factor that determines the tourism destination choice and less-visited parks offer considerable potential for future growth of tourism.

本研究评估了游客对自然旅游 (NBT) 属性的感知价值如何​​以及在何种情况下在不同类型的国家公园之间存在差异。使用从斯里兰卡四个国家公园的 343 名国际游客收集的数据进行了一种新颖的离散选择实验。我们发现大型物种遭遇频率、栖息地质量和与遭遇的野生动物的接近程度的提高产生了更大的效用。一个令人惊讶的发现是，游客们更愿意在国家公园度过有限的时间。他们还倾向于选择游客较少的公园，这些公园拥有大型哺乳动物，与访问次数较多的国家公园相比，他们愿意为这些公园支付更多费用。