【Aging, safety net and fiscal crisis in Japan】No.233: Japanese domestic travel consumption is high

The Japan Tourism Agency released statistics on the total number of stay days for tourists in April 2020. As shown in Figure 1, the number of days that foreign tourists spent in Japan decreased by 97%, from 9,702,700 days in January 2020 to 261,860 days. On the other hand, although the number of Japanese tourists has remained at over 10 million days, the duration of stay has decreased to one-third of the normal time.

Figure 2 shows the consumption of people sightseeing in Japan. The consumption of foreign tourists, one of the pillars of economic growth in recent years, was JPY 4,811 billion (US$ 45 billion) in 2019. Meanwhile, the consumption of Japanese tourists is JPY 21,911 billion (US$ 203 billion), which is 4.5 times that of foreign tourists. Breaking it down, JPY 17,149 billion was spent on overnight trips and JPY 4,762 billion on day trips (Figure 3). Therefore, as the economic policy shifts from the COVID-19 crisis to a new normal state, encouraging the domestic travel of Japanese people is more important than attracting foreign tourists.

Figure １ Total number of stay days for tourists

Figure 2 Amount of tourist consumption

Figure 3 Breakdown of the domestic travel consumption of Japanese tourists