I've tried a tourist city with mixed results. Here's what I've learned:
You need to have multiple cities in the region. You need to have big populations of your target gampling audience (eg to have a low-wealth casino work, you need a ton of low wealth people in the region. Same for middle and high.
Casinos need nearby commercial districs. Your commercial will naturally gravitate to hotels (which your tourists willa actually stay in). But if you have all high-density commercial I've observed, they will all try to corner the hotel market, and half of them will go out of buisness (E.g you'll have 4 high density high-wealth hotel all pop up next door to eachother. only 1 will survive), so watch out for abandoned high-rises.
Tourists, if they get bored, will take mass transit to a neighboring city. So your tourist area needs casinos, hotels, parks, and shops. Especially shops!.
Start small on your casinos and devolop your commercial for a balance of hotels and shops. Likewise, if you have 7 hotel spring up, don't equip your casinos with rooms our you'll drive your commercial hotels out of business. But if you want to have your casino make bank, then having hotels on the casino will definately increase the casino revenue (as the guests will play games the next day. If they stay in a commercial hotel, whether or not they come back to gamble is a crap shoot. PUN!).
While expensive and risky, if you can get the expo center to thrive, you'll boost you low and mid-wealth casinos. I frequently had sold-out expo shows, then all of a sudden they sold only enough tickts to break even. Likewise with the pro-bowl, i broke even once, and lsot money on every show thereafter.
I ultimately killed off my casino city and I think I know why: I had a big population so I my own city was driving my casino market. But I wanted to go dense so I plopped formal parks everywhere. I definately kicked up land value but at the same time, I kicked it up so much that all of my low-wealth tenements turned to high-wealth, and all of my low/mid casinos went bankrupt because I accidently made my city primarily mid/high wealth residence. oops.
Additionally you need a flawless transportation system. If you are like me and ahve a bus wait time of 240 minutes and a streetcar wait of 90 minutes, your tourists/residents will not make it into expo shows in time and you'll lose their ticket fee (in the explanation of the pro-bowl it even warns you tickets are refundable. No joke my friends).
If, at any moment you have power or waer hit the yellow, the entirety of your tourism buisnesswill be disrupted. If you hit yellow power during an expo show, the show is cancelled. if you hit yellow, casinos close.
Depending on the timing, (and liek it would work in reality) from my experience, if you lose power early in the morning the day of your expo show, and restore power in an hour or so, the show will go on. But if you lose it around the 8pm mark when the shows open, it's cancelled.
So you need to have lots of extra power and water at all times. One inturruption and you're entire economy goes to heck in a handbasket. Additionally, if I section of your tourist network is affected, all your other pieces will fall apart. Each casino feeds into the others. Every square foot of your mass transit network must flow smoothly. If you get traffic jams at every rush hour, your tourist industry will collapse because the tourists can't get to the next shop or casino, so they check out and head to yuor neighbors for more fun.
Half of this stuff I learned by querrying pedestrians. zoom in and find out their needs. It's a lifesaver.
And I note from being both a Simcity industrialist and tourism buff, that industries are way easier. If you want a challenge, go tourism. You need to be a master mayor, and you need the right site. Try for the ciries that have 2 highway entrances, and not just 1 offramp. You'll be drowning in taxis and need a smooth road network.
