Hey guys.

There seams to be a lot of those that seam to have a problem maintaining a profitable tourism industry in the long run.

I figured from my experience playing I'd point out some of my do's and dont's when it comes to tourism, I also know that my experiences may differ completely from others so I can see why people may not agree with how tourism is done by me.

Firstly, unlike your population growth where if you manage it well it will be a constant positive growth, tourists numbers will go up and down, from as high as 100 tourists to as low as 32 or so tourists.

Tourism numbers are basically dependent on two variables I have noticed. One is your tourist rating and the other is the actual time of the year.

There are high and low tourist periods for the year like in real life tourism industries around the world. (Personally I find I will get 100-120 tourists from Sept-Dec then afterward drop drastically to about 30-40 until about March-Jun before any noticeable changes in tourist numbers)

Additionally there are also the edicts that are available to you as well, aside from the Geographical Special edit which gives a permanent boost to your tourism rating, the rest are only for a set period of 3 years.

These edicts do increase the amount of visitors to your island, however these increases are also subject to the "high and low" tourism parts of the year. Thus you still will notice a drop in tourism numbers at certain points of the year despite any additional effort of your behalf.



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The above to images helps illustrates the concept that after a certain point of tourism being established on your island, there is a limit to the amount of tourists coming onto the island. This is shown by the time-line of revenue from the 1960's onwards.

Most importantly within the first image is the fact that out of all the revenue that is obtained in the industry, most of it, if not all will be derived from your hotel fees as opposed to your attractions. In my situations, with the exception of the botanical gardens, all my attractions where operating at a loss.

Which brings us to the big picture I'm trying to push forward, how do you make more money and keep it that way?

Take a look at the below 2 images.



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I have chosen the Beach Villa and Luxury Hotel for comparisons since you can only make 1 skyscraper hotel to begin with.

These are comparisons between a Luxury hotel and the Beach Villa, obviously the luxury hotel overall is making more money but take a minute to think...

Look at the number of visits to each building and also note that a Hotel needed to service 11 couples (22 people max, give and take single tourists as well) as opposed to only 2 couples (4 people) in the beach villa in order to generate these figures. So in actually, the beach villa is making more money PER TOURIST, rather than overall building.

Now lets do some maths for a bit.
The luxury hotel is making $82285 lifetime for 84 visitors
The Villa is making $54586 for 28 visitors in it's lifetime.
(For comparisons, I made both buildings at the same time,these two buildings where made in the early 1968-9 as you can see when my tourism first started to make revenue in image one)

Since 28vistors(Villa visitors)x3=84visitors(comparable of the luxury hotel), from these two buildings, we can say that the villa approximately makes $163758 ($54586x3) if the villa was to have 86 visitors as well to compare with the Luxury Hotel.

So now lets say instead of one luxury hotel with 100% occupancy, we make instead 5 Beach Villas at 100% occupancy instead. We have 20 people in this example to make calculating easier, but instead of accommodating more tourists into one hotel, we are now accommodating smaller groups of tourists into higher value and quality Beach Villas instead.

Math time again.
We'll go with the estimated yearly profit for the beach villa of $2814.
$2814x5= $14070 estimated profit for 5 beach villas as opposed to $9340 on a 100% occupied luxury hotel.

The above example is also only for distributing 22 visitors and gross profit, in reality on an island with 100 tourism rating, it is very easy to establish a constant tourism number of 30-40 even in the quieter periods of the tourist season.

Additionally if you simply find that it is also too hard to balance the number of housing accommodations properly to your tourist population, you can simply not hire maids in the tourism houses that do not have tourists in them in order to cut upkeep costs as well until the busy season around September (from my experience) begins, possible start hiring in August in order to get the maid's service quality up in preparation for the season.

So my plain advice for people is to instead of looking into making more luxury hotels and trying to hope for an increase in tourist numbers, make instead smaller accommodations like the beach villa in order to allocate the limited number of tourists into higher revenue accommodation which you are certain that will be coming. By doing so you increase your hotel quality and your revenue in the long run.

The only downside of this tactic of mine however is the need for Villas to be placed right on the beach as the building requirement, so this really is only possible if you have a lot of beach space so you can build villas on.

For me personally, I treat my beach villas like mansions and luxury hotels like apartments, I try to push as many as I can into the Beach villas and as little as possible into the luxury hotels. I usually close the slots of the maids in order to limit the number of tourists that can get into the luxury hotels until all my Beach villas are occupied before I hire maids in my luxury hotels and let tourists into them instead of letting them sleep in the cold outside at night.

Thanks for reading my post and feel free to comment on what your experiences with tourism is. (I do not have the expansion of Tropico3, so I won't be able to answer questions related to expansion exclusive tourism questions)

*EDIT*: Before, I made a mistake with my calculations lol, My beach villa calculations are accidentally made on the basis that a beach villa accommodates 1 couple in when fact they actually accommodate 2 couples in fact (5 beach villas will accommodate the same amount as 1 luxury hotel with 2 tourists still needing housing). I've recalculated the numbers properly now. Sorry if I slightly mislead you.

Please don't flame lol, I'm only trying to give a little bit of advice to guys having trouble getting the best out of tourism.

Much Respect and Thanks
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