Cities Skylines Tourism Guide

Cities Skylines Tourism Guide

One of the most interesting and pleasant parts of this game is getting lots of tourists visiting your city. Moreover, that’s not only pleasant but also vital for your economy. This guide is to explain the game mechanics of Cities Skyline tourism so you can make full use of all options.

How Cities Skylines Tourism Works

Tourists arrive in your city by different kinds of transport to visit monuments, parks and commercial districts. For you, it’s beneficial because tourists spend money in your city.

The number of tourists is determined by the attractiveness of your city. Thus the more attractive buildings and districts you build, the more tourists arrive in your city.

The most challenging thing about tourism is that having a big number of visitors means having heavy traffic. So your goal is to plan your city in the way that tourists arrive and have all the needed access and don’t trigger jams.

How Tourists Arrive

Let’s focus on the way tourists arrive in your city. At the beginning of the game, they arrive only by car. As time goes by, and you unlock new transportation options, they start arriving by train, plane, ships, and even by space elevator in the late game. 

After arrival, they want to go to the place that attracts them (a unique building, park, or commercial zone). This means they need a proper way of getting there. Sure tourists will choose the fastest transportation option. Thus you need to have public transport that is optimized for delivering big groups of people to points of interest. This is somewhat similar to organizing transport for your citizens with the only difference – the starting point is not a residential zone but an entry point such as an airport, a seaport, a railway station.

How to Handle Cities Skylines Tourist Traffic

There are two main Cities Skylines traffic tips for tourism:

1. Establish control over touristic traffic. This means you need to decide where they arrive and where they should go. For example, you can allow only one railway station to accept external traffic. Thanks to this, you will know that the visitors arriving by train will spawn there only. It makes it easier for you to organize proper transportation to the points of interest. Sure such concentrated touristic traffic requires more capacity for your public transport but you’re the one who decides. Also, it’s better to arrange tourist areas by placing unique buildings close to each other to have better control over the traffic.
2. Avoid crossing touristic routes with other traffic. If the bus line delivering your citizens from a residential area to industrial uses the same streets as the line for transporting tourists from a seaport to unique buildings then you may get traffic jams. It makes sense to separate these lines when possible.

How to Increase Cities Skylines City Attractiveness

In City Skylines tourism is boosted when you increase city attractiveness. This means you need to build monuments, parks, and specialized commercial zones to get more visitors, that’s the most working Cities Skylines increase tourism strategy. It’s important that different objects have different attractiveness, for example, Eiffel Tower provides 6 while the Gherkin has 12, you can find the full list here.

However, there are several Cities Skylines tourism tips you can use besides that:

City policies. There are several of those which allow you to increase the attractiveness of some districts. By the way, that’s another good thing to control your tourist traffic by boosting attractiveness in defined areas of the city. Here are the policies:

Advertisement Campaign (Parks) – Draws 20% more visitors for ₡200/week.

Boost Connections – Outside connection traffic capacity is increased by 20%. Applies to boats, planes, trains, and private cars. ₡10,000/week

Let Go of Leisure – your Cities Skylines tourism district doesn’t bring money from taxes but attracts much more visitors

Recreational Use – Slightly increased tax income. Moderately increased tourism. Slightly reduced the crime rate. +15% Police budget

Prefer Parks – For ₡100 per object, you can attract 10% more tourists to your parks, plazas, and park areas.

Build the Castle of Lord Chirpwick provides you with +100 attractiveness for the entire city and each unique building receives +25% attractiveness. Also, it just looks great, especially in a mountain city.

Build a Space Elevator. That’s a great source of visitors which is available in the late game and the first thing you need to do is to create proper transportation options because it will drive lots of tourists to your city.

When solving the how to get more tourists cities skylines issue you should always think about easy access to the points of interest. Tourists should find it simple to arrive in the city, find the right way and spend money in your city. Thus, a good system of hubs and proper public transport routes is a must for getting more tourists.

Where to Place Cities Skylines Tourism District

Tourism districts are among the places that are visited by tourists. This means there are some requirements for placing such districts if you want them to work well:

• Tourism district may be located near the entry point – an airport, intercity bus terminal, railway station or passenger harbor
• Another obvious location is the place where the most of your landmarks are located.
• Areas with high land value such as sea shore, beach and so on.

It’s always important to have proper transport connections and to avoid placing too big zones. Track the usage by tourists and the presence of the workforce in the area before expanding.

Cities Skylines Tourists Buses

Thanks to the Parklife DLC we have some new awesome features.

Tourist buses are pretty similar to regular buses but they’re for transporting tourists between points of interest. Honestly, I failed to create sightseeing tours that transport a lot of tourists. I think that’s because pretty often those lines duplicate routes of regular buses. However, I received some additional traffic jams next to those points of interest.

Cities Skylines Walking Tours and Balloons

Cities Skylines walking tours are pretty similar. You just place stops near points of interest striving not to make the route too long because this affects attractiveness. 

Balloons look really cool and add some festive atmosphere to your city though I can’t say they’re very useful.

Is Tourism Cities Skylines Hassle Worth It?

Sure your city can survive without developed tourism. However, working on this aspect is both interesting and beneficial. Tourism brings a serious amount of money to your budget though can trigger some traffic issues. Anyway, that’s an awesome challenge for those who love this game!