By Julian Ryall
Tokyo— The Guam Visitors Bureau sent a delegation to the “Tourism EXPO Japan 2024,” which took place at the Tokyo Big Sight last month. The EXPO is one of the largest travel and tourism industry exhibitions in the world with participation expected from over 1,000 companies and organizations from about 80 countries and regions.
While GVB has been ramping up its marketing spiel in Japan in a bid to revive Guam’s previously top source market, the agency seems to face a rather bleak return on investment.
More foreign tourists than ever before are visiting Japan, but that love of travel overseas is not being reciprocated in a nation that not long ago had a reputation as a major contributor to the global travel industry.
And while travelers elsewhere seized every opportunity to go abroad as soon as restrictions linked to the coronavirus pandemic were lifted, the Japanese have proved to be far more cautious. The reasons are numerous and complicated, analysts suggest, but there is no consensus on whether this is a temporary phenomenon or whether the Japanese will continue to opt for vacations closer to home.
A record 2.93 million foreign tourists arrived in Japan in the month of August, according to government data, up a remarkable 36 percent from one year earlier and an increase of more than 16 percent on 2019, the year before the global pandemic laid low the global travel industry.
In contrast, however, just 1.44 million Japanese traveled abroad during August, a decline of 31.9 percent on the 2019 figure and underlining the worrying trend of declining interest in overseas vacations.
Like Guam, the Northern Marianas is hoping for the recovery of the Japanese market.
Christopher Concepcion, managing director of the Marianas Visitors Authority, agreed that the outbound market from Japan is, at present, “soft.” In the peak year of 1997, the islands welcomed around 450,000 arrivals from Japan, he said, but that figure had withered to just 12,000 arrivals last year.
“The biggest factor that we are hearing is the weak yen,” he said. “Travel has definitely become more expensive for Japanese who want to visit dollar destinations and it is a huge factor for many people.”
Concepcion is confident the CNMI has “great potential and an excellent product” that can draw Japanese travelers back to the islands.
“There are a lot of reasons in play, with many blaming it on the weakness of the yen at the moment making foreign travel too expensive,” said Michael Stobo, a freelance travel consultant who has worked in Japan for two decades. “There are a lot of young Japanese who are not in full-time employment and who just can’t take time off because they don’t have the security to take a decent amount of time off.
“Safety is another big concern for Japanese travelers, so every time there is a mass shooting in the US that makes the headlines or a terrorist incident in Europe, we see tourism numbers immediately dip,” he said. “And that reaction to bad news elsewhere is the biggest among all countries.”
Another worry for Japanese is the quality of the service they will get, and particularly how that compares to the famously high standards they receive at home, Stobo said.
“They are used to high quality and too often in the past an overseas trip – an expensive overseas trip that they have planned and looked forward to for a long time – is a disappointment because it does not live up to their expectations,” he said.
Equally, while Japanese in the past tended to travel on package tours, they did not need to concern themselves with the inevitable wrinkles that crop up in a vacation or even need to know the local language as the travel agency’ representative would always be on hand to handle issues. That luxury is not available to independent travelers, who have increasingly taken over from package tours, causing concern among some when not everything goes according to plan.
Another uniquely Japanese consideration was identified in a report published in November 2018 by Japan Brand Qualitative Research and classified as FOMU, of “fear of messing up.”
Japanese travelers tend to carry out extensive planning before embarking on a trip, examining the flight options, hotels, attractions and activities. As a consequence, a bad experience at any point in the vacation risks turning it into a “failure,” the study found, with serious emotional consequences.
The solution for Japanese travelers is to not take a chance on a foreign holiday but to vacation at home, where standards are more easily guaranteed and it’s more straightforward to complain when expectations are not met.
“As travelers in foreign countries, Japanese are not very competent,” said Ashley Harvey, a travel marketing analyst who has worked in Japan’s travel sector for more than 15 years.
“They expect everything to be the same standard as in Japan when they are abroad, but I would argue that the whole point of foreign travel is to get a different experience, so see and try something new, whether that is the food, the hotel experience or whatever,” he said. “That should be a fundamental reason that people travel.
“I fear that in Japan, they expect to have someone hold their hand through each and every process,” he added. “Too many Japanese are just not ready for the world in 2024. And that is a huge contrast to, say, South Koreans, who are really up for foreign travel right now.”
Government statistics indicate that even the younger generation – previously seen as the driver of interest in parts of the world beyond Japan – are turning their backs on foreign travel.
Subscribe to
our digital
monthly edition
Comments