- Yala National Park in Sri Lanka offers the strongest resident price protection in the study, with locals paying just 1.42% of the international visitor fee.
- Wilpattu National Park, also in Sri Lanka, ranked second seeing locals pay 2.28% of the foreign visitor fee.
- Five out of ten parks in the top ranking are based in Tanzania, with Gombe National Park seeing the strongest resident price protection in the country.
- Nepal features two parks that offer residents reasonable park entry fees, including Sagarmatha National Park (Everest) and Maklau-Barun National Park.
National parks are among the world’s great shared spaces, but the cost of entering them can vary dramatically depending on who is visiting.
To identify where residents receive the strongest price protection, safari specialists Mahlatini Luxury Travel compared domestic and international access costs, including mandatory entry-related fees, across 155 national parks. Parks were ranked by the percentage of the international visitor fee paid by local residents, with lower percentages indicating stronger resident price protection.
Explore the data table below:
Sri Lanka Takes the Top Two Spots
Overall, Yala National Park in Sri Lanka ranks first. Local residents pay just 1.42% of the international visitor cost, the lowest share in the study. Wilpattu National Park, also in Sri Lanka, ranks second, placing the country at the top of the global ranking. Across the top 10, Asia and East Africa are especially prominent, with parks in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Nepal and Indonesia standing out for the scale of their resident discounts.
Sri Lanka’s position is notable because Yala and Wilpattu are not minor local reserves. Yala is the country’s best-known safari destination, famous for leopards, elephants, sloth bears, crocodiles, dry forest, lagoons and coastal landscapes. It has strong international appeal, particularly among travellers combining wildlife, beaches and cultural sites.
Wilpattu, Sri Lanka’s largest national park, offers a quieter and wilder-feeling alternative, known for leopards, sloth bears and its distinctive villus — natural rain-fed lakes that shape the park’s landscape and wildlife viewing.
Tanzania Dominates with Five Parks on the List
This pattern appears elsewhere in the top 10. Several Tanzanian and Nepali parks offer very low resident fees relative to international prices, even though the destinations themselves may be heavily shaped by international tourism. In these cases, differentiated pricing appears to serve two purposes at once: keeping formal entry costs low for residents while allowing international visitor fees to contribute more significantly to conservation funding, park management and tourism infrastructure.
The philosophical justification is simple: people who live alongside these landscapes should not be priced out of their own natural heritage by fee structures designed for wealthier international visitors. As Mahlatini Director and Co-Founder Greg Fox puts it, “It is insane that someone who lives alongside the Kruger has never seen an elephant.”
When Park Access Is a Public Good
The pricing model goes further in several countries, treating access to nature less as a visitor product and more as part of the public realm. Across the 155 parks in the study, 31 charge no general entrance fee for either domestic or international visitors. They include some of the world’s most celebrated landscapes: New Zealand’s Fiordland, Tongariro and Aoraki/Mount Cook; Iceland’s Þingvellir and Vatnajökull; Japan’s Daisetsuzan, Nikko and Fuji-Hakone-Izu; and the Great Smoky Mountains in the United States.
In some countries this reflects a wider public-access philosophy. New Zealand is one of the clearest examples: all three of its UNESCO-listed national parks in the study follow this approach. Japan’s national park network does the same. National parks in England, Scotland and Wales charge no general entrance fee, though visitors may still pay for parking, campsites or specific attractions.
Free access should not be read as a universal ideal. It is one funding model among several, and it depends heavily on national context. There are no free-to-access parks in Africa because entrance fees are not just a charge for access. They are part of the conservation finance model, helping fund ranger salaries, wildlife protection, park infrastructure, community revenue-sharing and the long-term costs of keeping ecosystems intact.
As Vanessa Dean, Mahlatini’s Head of Product and Experience, explains, those links are visible across multiple countries and species:
“Across Africa and the Indian Subcontinent, tourism revenue has played a meaningful role in conservation outcomes, even where the link is less visibly tied to a single permit or levy. India’s tiger population has increased under a protected-area system supported in part by tourism. One-horned rhino numbers in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park have recovered significantly. In Namibia and Kenya, black rhino populations have stabilised and expanded under conservation models that depend on tourism income. In southern Kenya, the Kimana Corridor, a critical elephant route connecting Amboseli with Tsavo and the Chyulu Hills, has also been supported through tourism-backed conservation funding, helping protect habitat used by large elephant populations, including some of Africa’s last remaining Super Tuskers.”
Find out more about the data study on the Mahlatini Luxury Travel website.
About Mahlatini Luxury Travel
Mahlatini Luxury Travel is a Certified B Corp luxury travel operator specialising in Africa and beyond. Founded in 2002, we have been sending clients to many of the parks, reserves and landscapes in this index for almost a quarter of a century.