Japan Tourism Agency announced that the total number of guest nights in Japan were down 2.4% year on year to 58.28 million in August 2019 (the secondary report), negatively affected by halved visitors from South Korea and the downward trend in local regions.
In September 2019 (the first report), the total was up 5% to 46.66 million guest nights with a 21.5% increase in guest nights of international visitors.
For August, the total consisted of 49.97 million Japanese guest nights (-2.5%) and 8.32 international visitors’ guest nights (-1.7%). Double-digit reductions year on year were found in Tottori, Kanagawa, Aomori, Gifu, Shiga, Wakayama, Yamaguchi and Kagoshima.
In the international visitor market, guest nights of visitors from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong accounted for 67.5% of the total. Guest nights of Chinese visitors were up 20.2% to 2.85 million, while guest nights of South Korean visitors were down 49.2% to 517.200. The high growth rates were seen in U.S. (+11.4%), Spain (+11.4%), U.K. (+11.9%), Singapore (+17.1%) and Vietnam (+30.9%).
The room occupancy rate was down 0.7 points to 69% as a whole in August 2019. The rate for ryokan was up 0.1 point to 50.8%, but the rates for other categories were down year on year: down 1.8 points to 71.1% for resort hotel, down 1.6 points to 79.3% for budget hotel or down 1.3 points to 82.9% for city hotel. By prefecture, the highest rate was found in Osaka with 83.3%.
