Tropico 4 Tourism - Over 300k/year

Making a lot of money from tourism in Tropico 4 can be difficult. Therefore, this guide presents to you step by step instructions on how to build a sustainable, high profit tourism island. Depending on your difficulty settings and your character traits, you can make more than 300.000/year from tourism only.

Intro

The next four chapters provide step by step instructions on how to build a profitable tourism island. The first two chapters will be very specific, while the last two are kept more general to give you a better understanding of the tourism concepts. If you are interested in a deeper knowledge about tourism in Tropico 4, the chapters afterwards are for you. Enjoy!

El Presidente - Traits and Background

All traits that boost your tourism rating are welcome. They do not affect the statistics shown in the game (e.g. without statues and edicts you will always only reach 80% tourism index), but nevertheless more and richer tourists will visit your island.

Background with impact on tourism rating (choose one):

• Travel Agent: 20% tourism rating
  
• Silver Spoon: 10% tourism rating and 10% Factory worker production
  
• Pop Singer: 10% tourism rating

Rise to power (chose one):

• Hotel corporate buyout: 30% tourism rating and first hotel for free
  
• Elected for family values: 10% tourism rating

Trait (you may choose both. They need to be leveled for full effect)

• Sociable: 10% tourism rating
  
• Well travelled: 10% tourism rating

Step 1 - Getting started

The following buildings will provide you with a nice income to get started. Hotel, Cabaret and Garage should be build in a beautiful area close to the beach and close to each other.

• Tourist Dock
  
• Hotel
  
• Cabaret (set to "Upscale Dress Code" and increase entry fee to 21)
  
• Garage

These buildings should provide you with an income of up to 30k/year already. They cost only 13,5k, so you should be able to build them right away. You can now take care of your inhabitants basic needs (e.g. healthcare, religion). To stabilize your income, add (another):

• Hotel
  
• Tourist Dock

Step 2 - Grow

Build

• Spa (Upscale dress code)
  
• Hotel (2x)
  
• Garbage Dump (needs to cover the tourism area)

The garbage dump keeps the environment nice and clean, such that the tourists feel happy. You may also want to invest in housing (I suggest building a Ministry, hire a Minister of Foreign Affairs, enact US Development Aid and build Apartments), because having shaks near tourists will make the tourists unhappy. Income should rise to 50k.

Add the following buildings:

• Marina (set to VIP Club)
  
• Hotel (2x)
  
• Police Station (needs to cover the tourism area)
  
• Cabaret (set to Upscale Dress Code)
  
• Tourist Dock (3rd overall)

With all the shaks gone and police around, the tourists will feel safe. Tourism rating should rise to 80%. Income should be around 80k.

Step 3.1 - Towards high revenues

For the tourists to spend their money, our goal is to have the following buildings:

• 15 Hotel
  
• 7 Cabaret (Upscale Dress Code)
  
• 2 Spa (Upscale Dress Code)
  
• 2 Marina (VIP Club)
  
• 1 Aqua Park (Daycare Service)

Those buildings have the potential to yield more than 300k/year. But do not build all the buildings listed above right away. We have to find a balance between attracting more tourists and providing buildings to earn money from tourists. Here is a guideline for you:

• If the average tourist spending limit is low (e.g. < 45) or hotel rooms are empty: Increase tourism index (see below)
  
• If the average tourist spending limit is high (e.g. > 60): Build another hotel
  
• If all tourist attractions (or only the Cabarets) are at 100% capacity: Build another attraction

Step 3.2 - Attracting more and wealthier tourists

When the tourism rating reaches 80%, it will no longer rise because of tourist happiness. But a high tourism rating is important to get more and wealthier tourists. We have the following options to increase our tourism rating even further.

• Build Christ the Savior statue
  
• Build Golden Statue
  
• Hire a Minister of Economy and enact tourism edicts

Our goal is to build both statues and enact all edicts. The following editcs can be enacted multiple times and should therefore be higher priority

• Tourism Ad Campaign (requires TV station)
  
• Mardi Gras (requires Pub)
  
• Spring Break Package (requires Pub and Airport)

When enacting more and more edicts and building the statues, the tourism rating may never exceed 110% or 120%. Nevertheless, there will be more and richer tourists coming to your island. Therefore, we want all of them! Note, that you have to enact the edicts every few years to keep their effect.

In addition, here are a few more hints regarding tourism edicts:

• Tourism Ad Campaign requires a TV Station. It can be build in your tourism area and set to "Learning with Larry", which will double the experience rate of your workers.
  
• Other edicts require the Pub, Night Club, Sports Complex and Ethnic Enclave. When building these, make sure no one can work there. This is, because having tourists visit the Pub reduces your overall tourism income (because the tourist could have visited a more profitable attraction instead) and the others attract other tourism classes (which we do not want, because they have less money)

Tourism area layout

If you want to maximize your profits from tourism, you need to use a good layout for your tourism area. The attractions should be close to each other, such that the tourists waste little time going from one to another. The screenshot below shows an example.


In the center, all attractions are clustered up and surrounded by the hotels to have minimum walking distances. Some attractions like the Marinas can only be build on the beach and are therefore just placed "as close as possible".

Supporting buildings like Police Stations can be built outside. The same holds true for the Aqua Park, because it is the only attraction children will visit.

Tourist spending limit

Every tourits in Tropico has an idividual spending limit. The spending limit determines how much the tourist will pay for each attraction he or she is using.

• A tourist with a spending limit of 41 pays 410 when visiting a Cabaret (yes, the spending limit is multiplied by 10)
  
• A tourist with a spending limit of 15 pays only 150 when visiting a Cabaret

Therefore, the higher the spending limit of your tourists is, the more money you are going to make with your attractions. Each tourist will visit multiple attractions during his stay on your island and each time he or she will pay as much as the spending limit allows (there are exceptions, see below).

Max tourist spending (of attractions)

Each attraction in Tropico has a maximum tourist spending value. The Cabaret for example has a value of 60. A Pub has a value of 15.

If the spending limit of a tourist exceeds the maximum spending value of an attraction, only the maximum spending value is paid.

• A tourist with a spending limit of 64 will pay only 600 when visiting a Cabaret.
  
• The same tourist will pay only 150 when visiting a Pub

Therefore, it is wise to build attractions with a high maximum spending value.

Tourist spending factor (of attractions)

For most attractions, a tourist pays ten times his or her spending limit for using the attraction. But for some attractions, the factor is only five. Some examples for such attractions are:

• Casino
  
• Cosmic Pin
  
• Movie Theater

Therefore, although the maximum spending of a Casino is 50, the following applies:

• A tourist with spending limit 50 will pay 250 for visiting a Casino.
  
• The same tourist will pay 500 for visiting a Cabaret.

When building a lot of attractions with a spending factor of 5, your income will be only half of what it could be with other buildings. Therefore, I suggest not using those buildings at all.

Tourist classes and happiness

Different classes of tourits will visit your island when building different attractions. Often, the work mode of an attraction also influences, which tourists are attracted. The attractions in this guide are chosen, such that only luxury tourists are attracted, because their average spending limit is the highest. Every tourist class may bring children, therefore the Aqua Park is built, which generates high profits from children and does not attract any specific tourist class.

You could also decide to build only one type of attraction. This will decrease tourist happiness, though. Getting a high tourism index is impossible this way (it will usually stay at 40% without edicts and statues). Therefore, I suggest to build three different attractions for each class of tourists you are attracting. This seems to be enough to make the tourists happy. In addition, having a nice environment (Statues and Garbage Dumps) and high safety (no shaks, 1 or 2 Policy Stations) is very beneficial.

Thanks

Thanks for reading this guide! If you have found out about ways to make even more money with tourism in Tropico 4, feel free to let me and the community know by leaving a comment. Constructive criticism is also welcome.

[Hybrid]

The problem I always had with tourism was the added traffic. The tourists will drive cars into your main areas, and Tropicans will drive to the tourist zone for entertainment. You can't just keep the roads separate, because tourists will use the same garage(s) your workers are using to commute. (And I don't consider it viable to make my workers walk across half the island to get home.)

Well, now I build zero entertainment buildings outside the tourist zone, and set the entry fee for the ones in the tourist zone to something unaffordable for Tropicans.

Downside? You're looking at a permanently 20% entertainment rating. Upsides? Tourists stay on their side of the fence, there's less traffic, and you save tons of space and money on the entertainment buildings you're not placing for Tropicans.

[Alex]

The development aid which reduces the costs of apartments and tenements is the USSR one, the US provides support with power plants and airports. Since you have to wait two years between foreign edicts, this means getting cheap housing first, and power second.

[Violetta Aeterna]

Got Tourism income up to near $600000 with this guide, very cool.

[cjbridge]

it work's in the beginning but as you go on the profit's start to decline

[battlezoby]

[Part 1 of 3][
Sigh... if they gave a damn about this game anymore, they would turn the Tropico Public Server back on and and someone could actually make a campaign that really requires you to try to make money via tourniasm and put features such as mentoned in this guide to use.

[battlezoby]

[Part 2 of 3]
As is, I think the closest might have been the Voodoo Island, but ther is so much space for agriculture (especially sugar) that tournism certainly never needed to be carefully managed, and I've accumilated over $2,000,000 without any thought whatsoever as to what type of tourist I want to attract. If the server was turned back on, someone (possibly myself, the author here, or someone else) could try to make a campaign to force one to try use the very interesting "tricks" that he mentioned, rather than leaving harvesting (sugar, logs, whatever) and/or being happy with slob tourists being a viable alternative that lacks the diversity of really trying to be successful in the tournism arena.

[battlezoby]

[Part 3 of 3]
On the other hand, I'm the person who go nuts teraforming, and a cute trick I keeping using on the Voodoo Shuffle is the ability to create a huge number of "beach villas," which can stretch for a long distance as you build some near the beach, make the beach bigger, and repeat, so I'm not sure what it would be like if not for that.

[Turlifutz]

I get your message, but the thing is with more people on the island I am trying to give everyone a job, so I usually build an airport, 2-3 tourist docks, all the possible entertainment buildings in pairs (one no dress code, the other one upper dress code) and as many hotels as I see fit. The issue is that although my tourism rating is 120, despite all this, I can only fill the skyscraper and 3-4 luxury hotels at best. It just doesn't seem right, you know?

[DoST]

Hello Turlifutz, I did not play Tropico 4 for several years, but trying to respond nevertheless. On my first screenshot you can see that the number of tourists was above 100 in 1955. But when going for the wealthier tourists it stabilized below 100. The goal of the guide was to make maximum profit with tourism. This was the best approach that I've found for that, but when using it the total number of tourists is staying relatively low. As far as I remember when going for other tourist classes you may attract more tourists, but overall earn less money. Hope this answers your question.

[Turlifutz]

Have you ever managed to have more than 100 tourists per year? I tried all the methods listed above and it seems there is a limit and I end up having empty hotel rooms.