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Monday, October 13, 2008

The Missing Tourists

Been to a major destination or attraction lately? Notice anything missing? If you're a people watcher, you might have noticed a pretty strong absence of Japanese tourists, often inveterate picture takers (digital was made for them) keen to record every moment of their vacation - and hence able to re-live those moments over and over again.

Where have all the Japanese gone? And why?

That's what The Alfred P. Sloan Travel & Tourism Industry Center at the University of South Carolina and the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Travel and Tourism Industries (OTTI) would like to know, too. So they're launching a landmark research project addressing that decrease in Japanese tourism to the United States. Dr. Robert Li, a center faculty associate, will manage the project.

The study should provide insight into the reasons behind the decline of Japanese visitors to the U.S. and provide options for market recovery. The study will also focus on Japanese travel outside of Asia, such as where they're going and why and how marketing to Japanese travelers can be improved.

OTTI statistics reveal that 3.7 million Japanese tourists visited the U.S. in 2006. They represent the fourth-largest tourism market for the U.S. after Canada, Mexico and the U.K. In 2006, Japan's visitors spent approximately $16.03 billion in the U.S., a 5-percent decline in the Japanese market following years of impressive growth.

"In some respects, this project may be more important economically than our Chinese outbound project conducted last year, because it represents a major market that seems to be vanishing," said Dr. Rich Harrill, director of the Sloan Travel & Tourism Center.

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