Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) reported that international visitors to Japan were up 18.2% year on year to 2,346,500 in June 2017, which were record-high result for June. The total for the first half of 2017 was up 17.4% year on year to 13,757,000, as visitors from all of 20 major markets broke the previous records.
Akihiko Tamura, Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) Commissioner, said at a news conference that the growth mainly resulted from an increase in LCC capacity particularly on the Korean routes and an increase young first timers. Also, the market was boosted by an increase in cruise ships and charter flights to Japan and effective promotional campaigns focusing on special occasions in the targeted markets, he added.
The table below shows change of international visitors to Japan for the past year
The top market in June 2017 was China with 587,200 visitors (+0.8%), followed by Korea with 568,900 visitors (+63.8%), Taiwan with 433,600 visitors (+9.0%) and Hong Kong with 201,800 visitors (+23.7%). Visitors from the top four markets accounted for 76.3% of the total. For the first half, the top market was Korea with 3,395,900 visitors (+42.5%), followed by China with 3,281,700 visitors (+6.7%), Taiwan with 2,288,000 visitors (+6.1%) and Hong Kong with 1,083,400 visitors (+24.8%). The big growths were especially found in Indonesia (+44.9%) and Russia (+40.6%).
Meanwhile, JTA announced that travel spending in Japan by international visitors for the second quarter of 2017 (April to June 2017) reached record-high 1,078 billion JPY, and the total for the first half exceeded 2,000 billion JPY for the first time.
On the contrary, spending per capita was down 6.7% year on year to 149,248 JPY. Tamura said, “Spending trend has been changing because growing individual travelers tend to spend money for themselves.” Also another reason for reduction of spending per capita was more short-stay travelers from neighboring countries than before, according to his analysis. To improve the market situation, JTA and JNTO are trying to attract more luxury travelers from Europe, U.S. or Australia.
