Ekonomiczne Problemy Turystyki

This paper seeks to present the results of a study of the development of tourist functions in Atlantic City and the economic effects of the service of tourist traffic in this city. In the history of its tourist functions one can distinguish several major stages, cyclic sequences, in accordance with R.W. Butler’s (1980) conception of the evolutionary cycle of a tourist area. In the early 1970s a chance to stop the declining tourist functions in Atlantic City was sought in the legalisation of gambling, which was regarded as the chief determinant of the city’s ‘reborn’ tourist activity. The implementation of this project led to the modernisation of the urban tourist space (Tables 1, 2) and an increase in tourist traffic. In 2005 the number of tourists visiting Atlantic city reached a maximum of 34.9 million (cf. Table 3), and in 2006 the city’s casinos-hotels earned the highest total income – 5.2 billion dollars (Table 4). In 2009 the gambling market slumped, causing a slowdown in the development of the city’s tourist functions. This was put down to two factors: 1) the global crisis, and 2) the legalisation of gambling in other states, also in Indian reserves. The economic effects of those factors, combined with the legalisation of gambling online (2013), could be felt not only by individual casinos-hotels, but also by the city as a whole. In 2012 the number of its visitors dropped to 27.2 million, while the income of hotelling-entertainment facilities amounted to 4.3 billion dollars.