Strategy games for tourism education
A family of turn-based simulators built at the University of Madeira for students, hoteliers and destination managers. Each game puts you in one seat of the tourism system and makes you live with what the other seats decide.
All five games are live · free for universities, hotel schools and DMOs
The games
Same destination, same 8-cycle rhythm, same pressure gauge. What changes is who you are and what you can decide.
Plan a tourist destination over 8 cycles and keep four dials in balance: economy, resident satisfaction, sustainability and authenticity. Seven selectable destinations, from an Atlantic island to the Adriatic cruise coast, and challenges drawn from today's headlines: water stress, housing protests, tourist taxes, digital nomads, viral overtourism.
Demand is born outside your walls: airlines, the DMO and tour operators decide how many people land. You decide who sells your rooms. Allotment contracts with release dates, OTA commissions or direct sales with early-booking and weekday offers; then staff, food cost, weddings and congresses, all read through occupancy, ADR, RevPAR and GOPPAR.
Run the destination marketing organisation. Spend a budget across source markets, fairs and airline co-marketing; win congresses; answer to hoteliers who want volume and residents who want quiet. Every euro you move shows up, one or two cycles later, in the arrivals the other games have to absorb.
The logistics layer of a destination: airport slots and seat capacity, cruise berths, ferries, buses, ride-hailing and rental cars. Match the connections the destination asks for against the people the territory can hold, measured in usable tourist area, square metres per visitor, length of stay and frequency. What you allow here becomes the ceiling of every other game.
Build the case for one project on the island, from a guesthouse or a 120-room hotel to an airport extension or a new cultural centre. The game walks you through each step of the investment scenario: sizing the market, forecasting revenue, choosing between equity, bank debt and leasing, and reading the result in NPV, IRR, payback and debt service cover. It explains every step and lets you see what one changed assumption does to the whole plan.
The system
The five games share one model of the destination. Played alone, each one treats the others as the weather. Played together by different classes, they become each other's weather.
Seats, berths and beds per square metre of usable tourist area cap how many people can arrive, whatever the promotion spends.
Budget by market and airline co-marketing turn capacity into arrivals, with a one- to two-cycle lag.
Channel mix and operations turn arrivals into revenue, jobs and a reputation score that feeds back into demand.
Every hotel, guesthouse, terminal or venue starts as a business case: market size, financing mix and projected returns decide what gets built and when.
Resident satisfaction, sustainability and authenticity move with the total, and policy pushes back on all three.
Classroom
Each game fits in two three-hour sessions plus a written report. The report is generated from the student's own game data and asks them to explain, with theory, why the result happened.
01 · Brief
Destination profile, the seat the student takes, the decisions available and the indicators they will be judged on.
02 · Play
The teacher pauses after cycle 2 to debrief the first contracting decisions, and injects at least one shock that hits everyone at once.
03 · Report
A structured report with the student's data pre-filled: demand decomposition, channel economics, displacement of one event, the P&L bridge and two shocks reviewed, with references.
Partners
Madeira is the reference destination. The engine is generic; each partner adds its own destination profile, markets, operators and shocks using shared templates.
Design, simulation engine, pedagogy and the research programme on simulation-based learning in tourism.
A regional business association will bring hotel-side realism: channel economics, staffing, event pricing and the shocks hotels actually face.
A destination authority will bring destination-side realism: arrivals by market, seasonality, air capacity and the logic of promotion and regulation.
Universities, hotel schools and DMOs can pilot the games for free and contribute a destination profile.
contact@strategytourism.app