Estimating Foreign and Domestic Visitor's Willingness to Pay for Entrance Fee to the National Museum of Iran

This study pertains to the investigation of dual pricing strategy for museums entrance fees, centering on the impact of two variables of “visitors’ attitude towards museums” and “traveled distance from the tourists’ origin to destination” on visitors’ maximum Willingness to Pay (WTP). Applying contingent valuation method, this researchaims to estimatea fair and optimal admission fee to offer to each segment of domestic and foreign visitors to the National Museum of Iran. Results manifest that domestic visitors’ WTP is negatively influenced by distance, while no significant relationship is found between these variables for foreign visitors. On the other hand, the attitude variable is significantly associated with both groups’ WTP with positive sign. According to the main findings, the mean WTP is RLS 9450 and US$ 6.31 for domestic and foreign visitors respectively, implying that the current entry fee of RLS 10000 is substantially less than what most foreign respondents stated as their maximum willingness to pay. This prompts considering a reasonable increase in the current entry fee and the practice of adopting dual pricing, whereby foreign visitors are asked to pay higher prices than domestic ones.