OIG examined opportunities for the National Park Service (NPS) to increase its recreation program revenues, focusing on NPS' three largest mechanisms for generating recreation revenues: park-unit entrance fees, interagency passes, and commercial bus tour fees. Park units (e.g., national parks, national recreation areas, or national monuments) use the revenues from these mechanisms for projects that enhance the visitor experience, such as facility maintenance and visitor information and services. We found that—
- NPS froze entrance fees shortly after implementing a new fee model in 2006, and today only a fraction of the park units that charge entrance fees base their fees on that model.
- NPS' internal process for parks to update their fees can take a prohibitive amount of time and effort.
- NPS issues three types of free annual entrance passes, plus a substantially discounted lifetime pass. These passes represent missed opportunities for revenue.
- NPS implemented its current fee schedule for commercial bus tours in 1998 and has not updated it since.
- Park units sometimes charge commercial bus tour operators a commercial use authorization (CUA) fee rather than following the fee schedule. For almost a decade, NPS has had only interim guidance in place for managing CUAs, which could be reducing opportunities for NPS to recover costs.
We made six recommendations encouraging NPS to assess its current fee policies, prices, and models and to determine where it can consider making updates. Shortly before we issued this report, we were pleased to learn that NPS has already begun addressing some of our recommendations and is working to implement the rest.