Tourism

Tourists are an optional source of income. They appear in the Tourist Center, on Earth, and will pay for the privilege of being carried on your landers to visit the solar system. However, their profitability is quite limited until you unlock reusable spacecraft (which have additional seats and smaller launch costs compared to the Bullet landers).

The Tourist Center contains 5 tourists for each expansion upgrade you purchase, starting with zero and reaching a maximum of 25 at level 5. You can browse and filter the list by various criteria, and select the tourists that you want to take, which will then be reserved for up to 24 hours. Any unselected or completed/expired tourists in the Tourist Center will be replaced with fresh tourists each hour. Tourists who are off-world will keep their slots in the Tourist Center reserved until they return.

Each tourist has a limited budget. Each world has standard credit values for performing flybys and possibly landings, which will be paid to you from the tourist's budget when sending them there. Each tourist also has a preferred destination (selected from the worlds you have scanned) and preferred activity. You receive a bonus payment (not deducted from the budget) if the world is the tourist's preferred destination, and another bonus if the visit is a flyby and the tourist's preferred activity was a flyby.

There are three basic approaches to carrying tourists: flyby, landing (with optional sightseeing), or a combination of the two.

Performing a flyby allows quick credits with a typically smaller fuel cost than landing, but tourists who want a flyby will invariably have a much smaller total budget. After taking a tourist on a flyby (whether or not it was their preferred activity), their preferred destination will change to Earth, and upon reaching Earth, they will return to the Tourist Center and become unavailable for further tours. They will then be replaced when the tourist list is refreshed.

Landing a tourist on a world will not change their preferred destination, allowing you to take them to distant locations in multiple hops, and tourists whose preferred destination is not Earth can be reused after landing on Earth. However, the credit value for landing on a world is typically much smaller than the flyby value.

Upon landing a tourist on a world, it is also possible to take them on various sightseeing tours using your vehicles. These tours allow you to obtain additional credits from your tourists before sending them home. Tourists whose preferred visitation method is landing will also specify a preferred sightseeing method (Landmarks or Expedition), allowing another opportunity for a bonus payment.

With reusable landers, it is possible to combine the visitation methods to achieve maximum payout. A Dragon or Aerospike Shuttle can land tourists on a moon with a Landing Pad and low gravity (such as Phobos), perform one or more flybys, refuel as needed, and then land the tourists back on Earth. In this fashion, you can extract the full budget from each tourist much more rapidly than sightseeing expeditions would allow. Note that after the first flyby, the tourists' preferred destination will change to Earth, so any additional flybys should ideally target Earth, but despite what the Destination planner will tell you, the final landing back on Earth will not receive any payment.