Increased movement of people through the development of modern tourism brings social, economic and environmental changes to receptive tourist destinations. Sociology of tourism is a branch of general sociology that studies the way in which tourist trends affect the societies that tourists visit, but also the tourists themselves (Cohen. 1984: 373). Sociological theory of economic, social and political (the division is made only for analytical purposes, these phenomena are intertwined) effects of later stages of tourism development, written by author Raymond Noronha, is the theoretical starting point of this paper. Noronha divided the development of tourist destinations into three phases („discovery” phase, „local response and initiative” phase and „institutionalization” phase), listed the changes that occur in interactions between tourists and locals and explained the impact of these changes on the nature of tourism and the life within local community. The objectives of this research were: to determine whether the history of hotel ownership in Dubrovnik follows Noronha's three-phase structure of change of ownership over tourist facilities in tourist destinations, to determine whether Dubrovnik is currently in the „institutionalization” phase of tourism development and to determine whether is it possible to observe economic, social and political effects of „institutionalization” of tourism cited by Noronha, in Dubrovnik. The method used was the content analysis of the of secondary sources. The existing scientific literature related to the topic, historical sources, media reports on events in Dubrovnik relevant to this topic and official data (on employment, crime rate, health phenomena...) published by the competent institutions were used to test the hypotheses. Based on the collected data, a model of the historical development of the hotel industry in Dubrovnik that does not follow Noronha's typology, and differs from the typologies most commonly used in domestic literature (Pirjevec and Kesar, 2002; Vukonić, 2005 and Cerović, Pavia and Galičić, 2005), was formed. After creating a model of the historical development of the hotel industry in Dubrovnik, examples from the everyday life of Dubrovnik were selected to analyse the thesis that the phenomena presented by Noronha about tourist destinations in the phase of "institutionalization" of tourism can be seen in Dubrovnik. This research is important because the domestic literature on tourism mainly focuses on macro analyses when it comes to tourism earnings and the number of tourist visits or on micro analyses when it comes to the ecological or economic sustainability of individual tourist destinations. However, the goal of sociological analysis is not to identify problems and propose solutions, but to provide in-depth explanations of social phenomena and the factors associated with them, in order to contribute to a better understanding of said phenomena.