I'm trying to make a living off of tourism (I just want to try it) yet every time I do, the same thing happens. I start off small with 1 tourist dock, about 4 hotels and several attractions. I scale everything up a bit (I reach 3 docks and about a dozen hotels) and I end up making a profit of 50.000$ which is good at the very start, quite very good, but I still need to scale up.
I get to the point where I have 9 docks and an airport and I still can't fill 20 hotels (whereas just a few in-game years ago I filled 12 from 3 docks). I just can't get more people to come to my island, now I make 75.000$ income but I spend 100.000$.
Crime is low, pollution is low, there are enough attractions and my tourism rating is just over 100. What could I possibly be doing wrong ? I just don't get it.
Best Answer
Making money from tourism is a real pain in the game. You are better of making industry, however if you really want to do it (for an achievement or the campaign or perhaps just a bit of fun?) there are a few tips I could give you.
IMPORTANT, before starting up any tourism, make sure you citizens are happy and you are earning a bit of money from industry or such. Without happy citizens, they can't be happy while serving tourists.
Focus on ONE or TWO types of tourists, do not try to please all of them, it will only ruin everything (from my own experience).
Make sure you place everything near each other, once you get an airport you do not want it to be on the other side of the island (I assume this would make sense?)
It helps to have your workers not to far off, or if they are a bit off always have garages so they can get to their work in the hotels fast.
Try to mess around with the costs of your hotels/entertainment structures. Are there no tourists there? Either they can't get there easy enough (garages, or lack of airport(s)/dock(s)), or it might simply be to expensive.
Make sure you have fully staffed buildings, no staff means that they tourists can't stay there!
Do not cut on costs for maintenance.
Only build new hotels/attractions if those you have right now are pretty much filled up, you do not want to waste money on something that's not required!
In the end, it's still a bad idea to do tourism if you really want to earn a lot of money in the game. Industry simply beats everything else.
Something to note you might not know about: the entertainment buildings that help both the tropico's and you have a rather strange system. The tourists will actually pay 3x more then the price it would cost your tropican's.