Tourists are still weighing the risks of travelling to the country hit by the earthquake and a nuclear-radiation crisis.
The earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan on March 11, and the nuclear crisis that followed, have had an impact on nearly every corner of the economy, perhaps none more directly than the tourist industry. The number of foreign visitors has plunged 50 per cent since the triple disasters, according to the Japan National Tourism Organisation. But four months on, travellers are trickling back. Most are business travellers, adventure seekers and bargain hunters, a type of visitor not often associated with Japan where a sushi dinner can wipe out a week’s savings.
The view of Japan as a high-priced playground is what kept Erin Conroy and Jenny McMeans, friends from New York City, from visiting. But this spring, they found round-trip tickets to Tokyo for just $600, about half what they normally cost, and booked a room in a hostel for 2,600 yen (about $33 at 79 yen to the dollar) a night. Suddenly, Japan was affordable, even with the yen near record highs against the dollar. “We felt like, in many ways, Tokyo was on our too-good-to-be-true list,” says Conroy.
And what about the danger of radiation? Conroy and McMeans says they perused travel advisories and were convinced that they would not be exposed to high levels of radiation.
Travellers seem to be gauging the safety of visiting Japan in different ways. Some rely on blogs posts written by foreigners living in Japan or frequent travellers to the country. Many, like Conroy and McMeans, turn to government advisories.
But confidence can be fragile when it involves radiation. So hotels, including high-end places like the Okura and the Imperial in Tokyo, have tried to entice visitors with discounts of up to 50 per cent. Deals also abound for tours, which has helped lure back visitors from Hong Kong and other places in Asia. “It’s less crowded now, and package tour prices are down 20 to 50 per cent,” says Masaki Hirata, the executive director of marketing and promotion at the Japan National Tourism Organisation.
For some would-be visitors, no amount of reassurances or discount airfares could persuade them to visit now. “We’ve had two aftershocks in the last couple of weeks, and I get e-mails from clients almost immediately asking if it’s safe to visit,” says Daniel Simon, the general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Marunouchi where bookings are down 50 per cent. But “we don’t really think the high-end leisure traveller will come back until Chinese New Year 2012 because there’s still too much negative news in the media about Japan.” Some hoteliers are attempting to directly reassure customers that their inns are far from trouble. Kisaburo Minato, who runs the Kimi Ryokan in Tokyo, recently wrote on his inn’s website that “the emergency at Fukushima is being exaggerated in the foreign press” and that except in the area near the reactors, “life goes on as normal”.
Still, many tourists are erring on the side of caution, says Ellie Colin who handles corporate and leisure travel at the Ovation Travel Group in New York. One client, she says, cancelled a $62,000 trip. “The headlines were really bleak and every single day they got more and more nervous,” says Colin who has not booked any leisure trips to Japan since. “My feeling is that it’s going to take until next year and some really good PR out of Japan before leisure travellers return.”
© The New York Times
