Japan tourism recovers to greater than 80% of pre-pandemic ranges for first time

Japan welcomed greater than 2 million guests for a 3rd straight month in August, recovering to greater than 80% of pre-pandemic ranges for the primary time, official knowledge confirmed on Wednesday.

The variety of international guests for enterprise and leisure was 2.16 million final month, knowledge from the Japan Nationwide Tourism Group (JNTO) confirmed.

Customer arrivals improved to 85.6% of the degrees seen in 2019, earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic led to journey curbs world wide.

The August numbers had been down from a post-pandemic excessive of two.32 million in July, however the restoration is continuous, aided by will increase in worldwide flights and a weak yen, which makes journeys to Japan extra reasonably priced than they’ve been in many years.

The variety of travellers from america, Europe, Australia and the Center East is already above pre-pandemic ranges, JNTO knowledge confirmed. That helps compensate for customer numbers from China which might be nonetheless far under 2019 ranges.

There have been 364,100 guests from China in August, a 16% improve over the earlier month, benefiting from Beijing’s lifting of restrictions on group journey to Japan.

Chinese language travellers made up about 30% of all guests and 40% of all vacationer spending in Japan in 2019. The lifting of the ban on group journey “will likely be a giant tailwind for inbound customer spending,” mentioned Masato Koike, economist at Sompo Institute Plus.

Tourism to Japan almost stopped for greater than two years through the pandemic, however arrivals have risen steadily

because the authorities resumed visa-free journey for a lot of international locations in October 2022 and scrapped remaining Covid controls in Might 2023.

Simply over 15 million guests have arrived in Japan within the first eight months of 2023, JNTO knowledge confirmed, nonetheless removed from the report tempo of about 32 million in 2019.

This story has been printed from a wire company feed with out modifications to the textual content. Solely the headline has been modified.