Development Strategies for Tourism Destinations: Tourism Sophistication vs. Resource Investments

This paper investigates the effectiveness of development strategies for tourism destinations. We show that resource investments unambiguously increase tourism revenues and that increasing the degree of tourism sophistication, that is increasing the variety of tourism related goods and services, increases tourism activity and decreases the perceived quality of the destination’s resource endowment, leading to an ambiguous effect on tourism revenues. We disentangle these two effects and characterize situations where increasing the degree of tourism sophistication is a viable development strategy and where it is impracticable without resource investment.