A set of seventeen criteria are selected, with attention to their "independence," which are the principle measures for the determination of "touristic attractiveness." Then, through a process designed to elicit consistent judgments from an interviewee, the contributions of twenty-six tourism "experts" were combined to form a set of numerical weights which establish the relative importance of the seventeen criteria. The process of establishing a "score," as an indicator of the relative attractiveness of a touristic location, is outlined in the discussion of two illustrative applications.

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For developing countries trying to increase their "buying power" in the community of nations, the establishment of a tourism industry is an important strategy for the generation of foreign exchange earnings. This paper develops a decision structure whereby investment allocation decisions for touristic projects may be made. The decision structure consists of a procedure to quantify the concepts of touristic attractiveness, a mathematical model representing the allocation problem, and a procedure for the solution of the model.

In a companion paper (1) a general mathematical model for the allocation of touristic investments was developed. In this paper a solution methodology for the model is developed based on the principles of dynamic programming. At each stage of the dynamic program an integer program is solved to limit the range of values of the state variable which must explicitly be considered. The algorithm is illustrated through an example, and the advantages of the solution procedure are explained by considering the solution as a base for the strategic decision making in the touristic sector.

For a developing country striving to increase its ‘buying power’ in the community of nations, the establishment of a tourism industry is an important tactic for the generation of foreign exchange earnings, and the implementation of such a tactic frequently involves a high level of direction from the central government. When such governmental involvement extends to include the direct investment of public funds in touristic facilities, then the central authority is faced with the problem of determining the most appropriate program for allocating the capital investments. The present study constitutes an investigation of this decision problem.