STAR-BULLETIN FILE
Waikiki businesses have been struggling to cope with the reduced number of Japanese tourists.
Slow summer forecast
for Japan trips overseasFewer Japanese are
expected to travel abroad
TOKYO >> The number of Japanese traveling overseas during the peak summer months is expected to drop 24.7 percent from last year due to residual worries about the war in Iraq and SARS, Japan's biggest travel agency said yesterday.
Travel to Hawaii is expected to slide 10.2 percent to 193,000, JTB Corp. said, and travel to the U.S. mainland is predicted to fall 14.9 percent to 205,000.
Hawaii and the mainland account for a combined 20 percent of all Japanese foreign vacations.
The forecast for the mid-July through Aug. 31 traveling season marks the largest decline since JTB Corp. began its annual predictions of tourist traffic in 1969, company spokesman Tsuneo Nishiyama said.
(For the year through May, Japanese travel to Hawaii is down 13.3 percent to 484,855, according to the Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.)
A total of 1.83 million Japanese are expected to take trips abroad during the summer -- when school and company holidays make family vacations easier to plan -- down from 2.43 million in the same period last year, JTB's latest survey showed.
Nishiyama said JTB expects the trend to change later this year.
"We expect a full-fledged recovery in tourism to come around September or after," he said.
Nishiyama said Japanese are particularly cautious about touring Asia, where the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome was most serious.
Japanese visitors to Hong Kong were expected to fall 48.1 percent to 56,000, while those headed for China would likely number 170,000, a 35.1 percent decline from the same period last year, JTB said. About 66,000 Japanese were expected to visit Taiwan, down 48.1 percent, it said.
Europe is expected to have 14.6 percent fewer Japanese tourists at 275,000, while Japanese heading to Australia, New Zealand and other South Pacific islands may be about 10.1 percent fewer at 116,000, according to the survey.
Japanese travelers will spend an average $1,900 for their travel expenses per person, up 4.6 percent from $1,806 last year, the JTB survey said.
