Exploring Links between Gateway Communities and National Parks: A Quantitative Assessment

Abstract

The definition of a gateway community to a national park unit has few quantitative benchmarks or standards. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate levels of tourism services in a sample of communities near selected national park units. The sample included 102 communities around 14 national park units. Three potential measures of "gatewayness," per capita retail sales, per capita accommodation and food service sales, and a combination were investigated in three stepwise regression models. Variables found significant in each regression were used in an agglomerative cluster analysis to separate "gateway" and non-gateway communities. Findings and Conclusions: Per capita accommodation and food service sales was determined to be the best measure of "gatewayness." The most important independent variable within a community was the percentage of housing for seasonal and recreation purposes. Also, selected "gateway" communities were relatively close to major metropolitan areas. Additionally, communities selected in the "gateway" cluster included gateway communities and stand-alone amenity communities defined as communities with large tourism economies that are largely independent of park visitor economic impact. The most noteworthy finding was that quantitative analysis can classify tourism based communities; however, such methods were less effective for distinguishing gateways from amenity communities.