Thanks to the upsurge in foreign visitors, as well as a tight supply and demand situation for budget accommodation utilised by domestic business travellers and foreigners on a shoestring budget, cities nationwide are experiencing an unprecedented boom in hotel construction.
The Weekly Toyo Keizai (6 February) reports that Okinawa Prefecture has been rapidly emerging as a popular destination, with the number of visitors from Taiwan, South Korea and other nearby Asian countries having soared over the past decade to total 1.5mn in 2015. The main and an outlying island each will see the opening of a new hotel this year, with a total of 400 rooms. At least seven more hotels are reportedly on the drawing board for 2017–2020.
One of the main barriers to the growth of tourism in the prefecture appears to be a shortage of workers in the travel service sector, partly due to a 30% disparity in wage levels compared with those in mainland Japan’s urban centres.
“Unless this problem is addressed, we can’t expect more human resources to come here for work”, said Taketo Sato, general manager of the Hyatt Regency Naha. “Okinawan hotels only have a few of the multilingual staff that are taken for granted in Tokyo or Osaka”.