As it turned out, she was able to get the resort to five star, by adding just a few items each day, based on what visitors complained about in their reviews. At the end of the process, I needed to add a wedding pavilion to get it to five stars, which I thought was not going to be affordable. But I checked the blueprints, and found it would cost less than $5000. So I extended boardwalk from the original VIP bungalow and made a platform for the wedding blueprint. At the same time, I added a third VIP bungalow between the wedding pavilion on the original VIP bungalow, but reached the point where she was down to only $34 in cash and couldn't finish decorating it. So I waited until she got her profits in the morning and finished it. Now she's getting $3762 every day in profits, a nice income that allows her to pursue her skill building without worrying about how she's going to pay her bills.
Building resorts is fun. Maybe when she gets to the elder stage, I'll move her back to IP, or maybe to ST, and have her build one from the ground up. I did that before with another sim, using the Spanish blueprints. I should try making one from the ground up with the beach blueprints.