Rationing is not a very fair way to distribute goods or services to people. Some people may value it just enough to pay the entry fee, while others might value it a lot more, but now they have the same chances of receiving it. If you prohibit people from on-selling their tickets, then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.
"Value" is an extremely overloaded word. Even within the narrow universe of money, economics, and finance, there are many different notions of value (e.g. market value, book value, replacement value). More broadly, what most people intuitively understand as value is independent of money and hard to quantify, but that doesn't make it less important.
I do appreciate that people want to make something as important as value quantifiable, but like all measurements there are pitfalls, and I merely pointed out a rather important pitfall when attempting to measure value using money.
> Rationing is not a very fair way to distribute goods or services to people.
So?
No one said life was fair. There is no human-right to vacation in a given destination. I have to apply for lottery hunts for various game animal in my state. It's just a means of controlling scarce resource.
> then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery.
What does "democratic access to their country" even mean? The tourists visiting their country don't vote, so you don't mean literally. And any random rationing system you put in place will be inherently unfair in some dimension.
The work "democratic" does not always directly relate to governing a country, but also making something accessible to all without unnecessary limitations - similar to the right to vote.
For this point:
"If you prohibit people from on-selling their tickets, then you also causes losses when people change their minds but are already locked in by the lottery."
You could just have a return program. 30 days out it is free, 10 days out and you pay a small percentage but get your money back. You don't need to rely on selling tickets to others to get your money back
Aside from the fairly large costs involved in running multiple large international lotteries, you'd have to build checkpoints around massive areas, stop people from buying tickets off of the winners somehow, deal with the corruption issues, and other exciting unintended side effects.
All because a tax on a luxury (which tourism certainly is), wasn't fair enough.
Actually, lottery is how they do it for various exclusive/special destinations & tours in Japan and it seem to be working in their case.
This is used for rides on the Yamanashi maglev test tracks, tours to the Kurobe gorge railway upper track and other places with inherently limtted capacity.