While travel to Japan has clearly diminished since the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, the U.S. is bracing for a drop in Japanese tourists, many of whom will be unwilling or unable to travel abroad.
Japan is the United States’ fourth largest inbound travel market, following Canada, Mexico and Britain. Between January and November 2010, the U.S. welcomed 3.1 million Japanese visitors, a 17.2% increase compared with the same period in 2009, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Office of Travel and Tourism Industries.
Destination marketing organizations across the U.S. are bracing for a negative impact, though how great the impact will be remains unclear.
"Historically, Los Angeles has been the No. 1 gateway for visitors from Japan to the U.S. mainland," said Mark Liberman, president and CEO of LA Inc., the Los Angeles convention and visitors bureau.
Liberman said that while LA Inc. could not predict how large the drop in visitors from Japan would be, "we have already seen airlines adjusting their schedules to meet the decrease in demand."
Last year, Los Angeles welcomed 25.7 million visitors, of which 1.3%, or 305,000, were from Japan. Japanese visitors spent an estimated $270 million in Los Angeles last year, according to LA Inc.
Overall, Japanese travelers to California spent more than $600 million in 2010, according to the San Francisco Travel Association (formerly the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau), which cited research from the Commerce Department and the California Travel & Tourism Convention.
The San Francisco Travel Association said it did not have immediate figures on how events in Japan have been affecting inbound tourism.
But Michael McCarron, director of community affairs at San Francisco Airport, said that "all inbound flights from Japan are operating at 98% capacity or higher," compared with outbound flights to Japan, which "are operating at 50% or less capacity, which is lower than average for this time of year."
The New York Post earlier this month speculated that New York’s tourism industry would lose as much as a $1 billion in revenue due to cancellations by Japanese tourists. But the city’s marketing organization, NYC and Company, disputed that figure.
While acknowledging that the city will feel a pullback from Japanese visitors, NYC and Company predicted that the loss would be nowhere near that severe.
"Last year, New York City welcomed 225,000 Japanese visitors, who spent an estimated $565 million in the city," said NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta. "But that’s less than one half of 1% of all visitors. We expect the current and very sad disaster in Japan to have an impact on visitors to New York City, but a fraction of what some have speculated."
Noel Hentschel, chair of the inbound operator AmericanTours International, which works with the Japanese market, said that while Japan used to be one of the biggest inbound markets to the U.S., the market has not been as robust since 9/11.
Indeed, travel from Japan to the U.S. and California had been on a steady downturn going back as far as the mid-1990s, according to the San Francisco Travel Association. Factors influencing the decline included a weak Japanese economy, 9/11, SARS, the H1N1 flu virus and the recent global credit crisis, the association said.
But until this most recent catastrophe, the Japanese market was beginning to rebound. Japan accounted for 48% of Asian resident visitors to the U.S. in the first 11 months of 2010, according to the Commerce Department, which has not yet released full-year data for 2010.
Following the March 11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan, Hentschel said, travelers have continued with their planned trips to the U.S., but there has been a drop-off in company-sponsored group trips as earthquake aftershocks continued to rattle the country.
'Where the cancellations and postponements have taken place are the incentive groups, where companies are paying for it, like Sony bringing their top salespeople to the United States," Hentschel said. "These companies have postponed because of the aftershocks, because people may be concerned about families. Companies are playing it safe."
Hentschel said that Japanese incentive travel accounted for about 20% of her firm’s overall inbound Japanese business.
"It’s still an extremely important market, and they still spend quite a lot of money shopping," she said. "But they also don’t have the overall numbers, like a billion people from China."