The willingness of tourists to pay for services in rural tourism destinations

Tourism-baed development would only takes place if local communities are provided with the revenues earned from visiting tourists who are willingly pay for tourism services offered. This study, therefore, sought to investigate the willingness of toursits visiting the villages of Shandiz city in Binalood town to pay for tourism services offered there. Being a descriptive-analytic research, the study used conditional evaluation method and logit model to measure the pay willingness rate. Vikor model was also employed to identify the spatial differences among the tourists in terms of their willingness to pay for the services they received. The population of the study comprised of eleven villages which were visited throughout 2018 by 96 visitors who were selected as the participants of the study according to Cochran formula with 0.1 error rate. The results of the stusy indicate that tourists tends to spend an average of 776540 Rials (equal to 6 USD) in the villages they visit. Taking the the total willingness of the visiting tourists to pay for the services for a full day into account, commercial facilities, catering, recreation, and residential facilities were the most willingly paid services respectively. Moreover, based on the Vikor model, tourists spend more money in Virani village as more services are offered there in terms of restaurant, catering, and residential facilities.