Japanese tourists put off travel plans due to crisis

Japanese travellers to Cebu may not come in numbers this Sinulog season as compared to the previous years as Japan is currently one of the world’s leading economies that have been greatly affected by the crisis.

Japan Association of Tour Industries-Cebu (JATIC) vice president Manabu Kubota said that smaller number of Japanese tourists could be expected this coming Sinulog.

Kubota said that the main reason behind this major decline is that Japanese tourists are now starting to hold off their leisure activities to save up for the future because of the uncertainty of the global economy.

He said that this year, they have fewer guests that will be coming over to celebrate the Sinulog event compared to last year.

“We always promote Sinulog every year to the Japanese market and in fact we started selling our package since last September. However, our package this year does not include the tickets for the contest at the Cebu City Sports Center but only for the grand parade in Mango Avenue and the fireworks in Ayala. Comparing from January of last year to this year, we had more guests then and we sold a lot of tickets also last year,” he shared.

Kubota said that this year, they only managed to get four Japanese guests composed of two couples as compared to the 70 guests they had last year which was composed of groups.

“Definitely we decreased this year and I can tell that by the volume of bookings that we have received this year as compared to the same period last year. But I can not tell as of now how many percent is the decline,” he said.

Kubota said that usually their Sinulog packages last for three nights and four days or four nights and five days and their guests could take Bohol tours and other island hopping packages as optional tours.

Based on a data from the Department of Tourism, foreign tourists, particularly those from the country’s top markets such as Japan and South Korea have sharply went down for the past months and it is expected that fewer foreign travellers will pursue their vacation plans for this year.

“Japanese people prefer to save for now because they are having a hard time earning it. They have money but unlike before that when times get tough, they still have the money to spend for leisure. But this time, especially this year, they prefer saving it rather than spending and this is because of the global crisis which they are very affected with,” said Kubota.

He shared that having read from Japanese news articles he found out that the number of homeless and jobless people in Japan rapidly grew and is still growing and that even Toyota Japan, one of the biggest companies there has declared that they are losing.

“But I believe that they can survive but we just don’t know how long it would take but knowing Japan, it would probably not take too long to recover,” stressed Kubota.

He said that despite the few number of guests coming this Sinulog, they are expecting a rebound in February as they anticipate more guests this year compared to last year based on their finalized bookings.

“There are still many bookings that are not yet final for February so maybe the number will still go up or maybe there will also be cancellations. But this good news shows that Japanese tourists will not decline for the most part of the year. Japanese tourists still have budget left to spend for other leisure but this year most of them would opt to save instead of spending maybe because they are worried about the uncertain things that might happen in the future,” he said.— Rhia de Pablo