United States has announced the hike of 417 national parks, monuments, and the heritage sites from this summer.
The seven-day vehicle passes for some 66 national parks will increase by $5 starting June. The entrance fee at Yosemite National Park, most-visited national parks with more than 4.3 million visitors in 2017, will cost $35, which is $5 fees hike.
The move was expected after the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, announced in October that it was considering an entrance fee hike.
The decision by U.S. Department of the Interior is meant to bring in more revenue to address the national park service’s $12 billion, decades-long maintenance and infrastructure backlog.
Last year, there are about 331 million people visited U.S. national parks and spent more than $18 billion in and around the parks.
But by 2020, there are some 117 parks such as Cape Cod National Seashore and Badlands National Park will begin to elevate its fees. That’s about 28 percent of the total, according to the Interior Department plan.
The National Park Service estimates the new fee structure will generate an increase of $60 million in annual entrance fee revenue once it’s fully implemented in 2020. The entrance fee revenue for fiscal 2016 was about $199 million.
In March, the U.S. Interior Department said it was reconsidering $50 fee hike which was initially proposed last October after it got more than 100,000 complaints during a public comments period that ran from October through December.
