Tourism isn’t a massive source of income, but it does help. (Also, it’s always pretty cool to see people coming in droves to admire your beautiful city!) So if you want to boost your city’s attractiveness rating, it basically comes down to two things: raising land value all over your city, and building unique buildings in your city.
Part 1: Raising Land Value
You can check land value by clicking on the dollar sign icon in the info views panel. Generally, areas with high-level zoned buildings, provided with plenty of services, parks and plazas will have high land value. Here’s a few techniques to work on raising your land value quickly.
Tip #1: Provide services, parks and plazas
Raising land value essentially comes down to making your zones pleasant for your cims: providing adequate access to services such as fire safety, police, and health, and plenty of leisure establishments. Parks and plazas play a major part in increasing land value, so be generous with these (sensibly within your budget, of course!)
Tip #2: Keep Low-Land Value Spots Away From Other Zones
Industry, garbage facilities, and inland sewage facilities unavoidably come with low land value. Since you need these in your city, the best compromise is to just keep them some distance away from your other zones—especially residential. This is to avoid their negative land value (and other negative effects such as ground and noise pollution) from affecting the land value of other areas.
Tip #3: High-level Park Areas (Parklife DLC) and Campus Areas (Campus DLC) Have High Land Value
While they’re not always easy to achieve, having a 5-star park area or campus area always pays off. As well as being profitable, they also tend to have high land value.
Part 2: Having Unique Buildings
The other major factor in making your city attractive is having unique buildings. Some of them can be difficult to obtain—requiring destructive or unfavorable conditions to unlock—as well as expensive in terms of build cost and upkeep. However, as you progress through your game it’s worth it to keep an eye on which ones are reasonably within reach to unlock, and within your means to build and maintain. Not only do they add a lot of visual interest to your city, they also directly add to your city’s attractiveness and bring in a lot of tourists.