the tourist boom

Is Netflix’s The Tourist Based on a True Story or a Book?

In Netflix’s ‘ The Tourist ,’ a man has to face the consequences of his actions, but the problem is that he remembers nothing about his past and his actions. A car accident in the desolation of the Australian Outback leaves Jamie Dornan’s character with absolutely no memory of who he is and where he comes from. He soon realizes that he doesn’t have the luxury of time and must figure out his origins as soon as possible because whatever he did in the past has put him on the bad side of some really bad people who want to kill him. Created by Harry Williams and Jack Williams, the show weaves an entertaining tale of mystery, action, and humor and makes one wonder if such a thing has really happened to someone.

The Tourist is a Fictional Tale With Existential Questions at Its Heart

‘The Tourist’ is a completely fictional show developed by Harry and Jack Williams, the duo known for their work on shows like ‘ Fleabag ’ and ‘Call the Midwife.’ They have also created shows like ‘ The Missing ’ and ‘Baptiste,’ the crime thrillers that have been immensely popular. However, after working on a lot of dark thrillers, the duo wanted to do something that would be less grim than their previous works and be more fun, not just for the audience but also for them. They wanted to explore the genre and deliver something with a completely different tone than what they are known for.

The idea for ‘The Tourist’ developed from a scene they had in mind. The scene, which eventually became the first scene of the TV show, was about a guy being chased by someone and then having an accident, following which he forgets everything about himself. Who is he, where did he come from, and how did the accident happen? All these questions are just the tip of the iceberg. The premise opened the door for them to delve into deeper existential questions. The protagonist not only has to dodge the attempts on his life and fight killers who are after him for unknown reasons, but he also has to figure out whether he himself is one of them. And if so, then can he accept his reality?

The first scene was compelling enough, and when the duo presented the idea to others, people would prod them for “what happens next.” The writers had no idea, and that, in a way, made the writing process even more fun for them. They hadn’t created any backstory for the protagonist prior to the first scene. He was just as much of an enigma to them as he was to himself and the audience at the beginning of the show.

Another thing that decided the look and the vibe of the show was its setting. The creators wanted something to echo the “vast expansive emptiness” inside the protagonist after the accident and loss of his memories, and the Australian Outback proved to be a perfect setting. The idea had started with an Australian setting, but they also briefly considered other places, including America. In the end, however, they came back to the original setting.

Jack Williams revealed that the idea for Australia came from his own experience while visiting the country. He’d been there a very long time ago, and the sheer scale of the place, especially the Outback, stuck with him. On the roads in the Outback, he considered the possibility of being stranded and how no one would know that he was stranded and there would be no one around to help him. When the idea for ‘The Tourist’ was being explored, he realized that putting the protagonist in the same situation in the same place opened up a lot of avenues for the story. It was an extremely remote and terrifying place to be stranded for a person of a different nationality with no memory of who he was and where he came from.

When it came to the characters, the writers focused on writing them realistically, giving them their own detailed backstories that feed into their present actions and dictate the kind of person they turn out to be. The actors brought their own personal experiences to the parts, and with the general humor mixed with the vulnerability their characters required, it was easier to slip into their skin and become those people. All of this, combined, makes ‘The Tourist’ an excellent story, delivered with such an eye for detail that it makes the audience relate to the characters, giving a realistic touch to an otherwise unbelievable series of events.

Towards resilience and sustainability: Travel and tourism development recovery

Window view of plane wing during sunset. The travel and tourism sector is slowly beginning to recover.

The travel and tourism sector is slowly beginning to recover. Image: Unsplash/Eva Darron

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The World Economic Forum has published its inaugural Travel and Tourism Development Index .
It focuses on the growing role of sustainability and resilience in travel and tourism growth.
Recovery for the sector is uneven and tourist arrivals in January 2022 were still 67% below 2019 levels, according to the World Tourism Organization.
Here are some key findings from the index on how the sector can build back better.

In 2018, international tourism grew for the ninth consecutive year. Tourist arrivals reached 1.4 billion and generated $1.7 trillion in export earnings, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).

Travel and tourism: post-pandemic

The picture looked very different two years later, as COVID-19 lockdowns hit the travel and tourism (T&T) sector hard. In 2020 alone, it faced losses of $4.5 trillion and 62 million jobs , impacting the living standards and well-being of communities across the globe.

While the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines and easing of restrictions means a recovery has now started, it’s proving gradual and uneven largely due to variations in vaccine distribution, and because of Omicron and its BA.2 subvariant. And customers are not only being more cautious when it comes to health, but also around the impact of travel on the environment and local communities.

International tourist arrivals rose by 18 million in January 2022 compared with a year earlier. This equals the increase for the whole of 2021 from 2020, but January’s numbers were still 67% below the same month in 2019, according to the UNWTO.

The war in Ukraine has added to instability and economic disruption for the sector. Against this backdrop, the World Economic Forum’s inaugural Travel and Tourism Development Index reflects the growing role of sustainability and resilience in T&T growth, as well as the sector’s role in economic and social development more broadly.

The TTDI benchmarks and measures “the set of factors and policies that enable the sustainable and resilient development of the T&T sector, which in turn contributes to the development of a country”. The TTDI is a direct evolution of the long-running Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI), with the change reflecting the index’s increased coverage of T&T development concepts, including sustainability and resilience impact on T&T growth and is designed to highlight the sector’s role in broader economic and social development as well as the need for T&T stakeholder collaboration to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, bolster the recovery and deal with future challenges and risks. Some of the most notable framework and methodology differences between the TTCI and TTDI include the additions of new pillars, including Non-Leisure Resources, Socioeconomic Resilience and Conditions, and T&T Demand Pressure and Impact. Please see the Technical notes and methodology. section to learn more about the index and the differences between the TTCI and TTDI.

The Travel and Tourism Development Index 2021

The index covers 117 economies, which accounted for around 96% of the world’s direct T&T GDP in 2020. It measures the factors and policies that will enable sustainable and resilient development of the sector.

These include everything from business, safety and health conditions, to infrastructure and natural resources, environmental, socioeconomic and demand pressures.

“As the sector slowly recovers, it will be crucial that lessons are learned from recent and current crises and that steps are taken to embed long-term inclusivity, sustainability and resilience into the travel and tourism sector as it faces evolving challenges and risks,” says the publication, a collaboration between many of the sector’s stakeholders.

The index consists of five subindexes, 17 pillars and 112 individual indicators, distributed among the different pillars, as shown below.

The Travel and Tourism Development index is based on 17 pillars.

On average, scores increased by just 0.1% between 2019 and 2021, reflecting the difficult situation facing the sector. Only 39 out of 117 economies covered by the index improved by more than 1.0%, while 27 declined by over 1.0%.

Nine of the top 10 scoring countries are high-income economies in Europe or Asia-Pacific. Japan tops the ranking, with the United States in second, followed by Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, the United Kingdom and Singapore. Italy completes the top 10, moving up from 12th in 2019.

Viet Nam experienced the greatest improvement in score, with a rise of 4.7% lifting it from 60th to 52nd on the overall index. Indonesia achieved the greatest improvement in rank, increasing its score by 3.4% to climb from 44th to 32nd, while Saudi Arabia achieved the second greatest improvement in rank, moving up to 33rd from 43rd as its score rose by 2.3%.

Rebuilding travel and tourism for a sustainable and resilient future

Here are some of the key findings from the publication:

1. The need for travel and tourism development has never been greater

The sector is a major driver of economic development, global connectivity and the livelihood of some of the populations and businesses most vulnerable to, and hard hit by, the pandemic. In 2019, T&T’s direct, indirect and induced GDP accounted for about 10% of global GDP . For many emerging economies, T&T is a major source of export revenue, foreign exchange earnings and investment. Research has shown that T&T growth can support social progress and create opportunities and well-being for communities, so supporting travel and tourism development and recovery will be critical.

2. Shifting demand dynamics have created opportunities and a need for adaptation

In the shorter term, challenges such as reduced capacity, geopolitical tensions and labour shortages are slowing recovery. However, opportunities have been created in markets such as domestic and nature-based tourism, the rise of digital nomads and “bleisure” travel – the addition of leisure activities to business travel. Many countries have provided incentives to boost domestic tourism. For example, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong SAR, China, have rolled out programmes that provide discounts, coupons and subsidies for domestic travel. The trends towards more rural and nature-based tourism offer an opportunity for less-developed economies to harness the benefits of travel and tourism given that the distribution and quality of natural assets are less tied to performance in economic development, with natural resources being one of the few pillars where non-high income economies typically outperform high-income countries. The travel and tourism sector stakeholders’ ability to adapt under these conditions highlights its capacity for adaptation and flexibility.

3. Development strategies can be employed to help the sector build back better

Amid the current challenges, shifting demand dynamics and future opportunities and risks, a more inclusive, sustainable and resilient travel and tourism sector can be – and needs to be – built, says the publication. But this calls for thoughtful and effective consideration. It also requires leveraging development drivers and strategies. This can be done by: restoring and accelerating international openness and consumer confidence through, for example, improved health and security; building favourable and inclusive labour, business and socioeconomic conditions; focusing more on environmental sustainability; strengthening the management of tourism demand and impact; and investing in digital technology.

A note on the methodology

Most of the dataset for the Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI) is statistical data from international organizations, with the remainder based on survey data from the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion Survey, which is used to measure concepts that are qualitative in nature or for which internationally comparable statistics are not available for enough countries. The index is an update of the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI), but due to the altered methodology, framework and other differences, the 2021 TTDI should not be compared to the 2019 TTCI. To help address this, the 2019 results were recalculated using the new framework, methodology and indicators of the TTDI. Therefore, all comparisons in score and rank throughout this report are between the 2019 results and the 2021 results of the TTDI. Data for the TTDI 2021 was collected before the war in Ukraine.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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$5 for locals, $30 for tourists: Japan tourist boom prompts pricing divide

Foreigners traveling to Japan’s Himeji Castle may soon have to pay six times more than domestic visitors, as the city’s mayor attempts to combat surging tourism and a weak local currency that makes the country a little too attractive to visitors.

The entrance fee for Himeji Castle, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Hyōgo Prefecture, is currently 1,000 yen — roughly $7 — for visitors ages 18 and up. At a news conference Sunday , Himeji Mayor Hideyasu Kiyomoto said he would like foreigners to pay $30 and locals to pay $5, with the intent of putting the money toward castle maintenance.

Tourist taxes are hardly new. Surcharges meant to target international visitors are often embedded in hotel receipts or as visa fees. However, such policies were once unusual in wealthy Japan, where the yen has lost more than 40 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar over the past five years, resulting in a sharp disparity in purchasing power between locals and visitors.

It isn’t just public officials such as Kiyomoto proposing dual pricing for foreigners. Some private business owners have implemented different prices for tourists, with one buffet seafood restaurant in Tokyo earning headlines last month when it decided to charge foreigners roughly 1,000 yen more for its set menus.

The problem isn’t so much that tourists can spend more, but that there are so many. The Washington Post reported last month that Japan was struggling amid a post-covid travel surge during which an unprecedented 25 million tourists visited the country in 2023, straining local residents and daily life.

“If you wanted everyone to pay their fair share regardless of where they came from, an argument could be made that people from the U.S. should pay more so that they are ‘paying’ as much as the Japanese,” explained Dan McCole, an associate professor of tourism and sustainability at Michigan State University. “And rather than just single out people from the U.S. or have a different price for every currency, it’s easier to have a lower price for residents.”

Foreign tourists accounted for 30 percent of the 1.48 million visitors to Himeji Castle in fiscal 2023, local paper Yomiuri Shimbun reported this week — the highest number ever.

When visitation increases to a cultural or natural site, so does the need for restoration and management, McCole explained. These sites often then increase fees to lower visitation or spend money on investments that will increase the site’s capacity.

“Introducing a higher entry fee for international tourists can also be seen from a social sustainability perspective; the castle has a cultural value for the local people and access should be granted to them,” said Linda Osti, a senior lecturer in tourism management at Bangor University.

“Secondly, it can also be seen from an economic perspective; often cultural monuments are maintained by local authorities with the use of public money raised through taxes imposed on local people,” she added. “Therefore, in a sense, locals have already paid for the maintenance of the building or cultural asset. They should not be charged twice.”

Himeji Convention and Visitors Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

The yen’s value compared with the dollar has fallen over the past decade and took a particularly sharp nosedive during the coronavirus pandemic. Shopkeepers and restaurant owners such as Shogo Yonemitsu, who opened a restaurant called Tamatebako in Tokyo in April, are charging foreigners more.

Yonemitsu explained to local media last month that Japanese patrons are charged 5,980 yen for an all-you-can-eat seafood course, while foreigners are charged 6,980 yen — a difference of roughly $7.

“Considering the cost of serving foreign visitors to Japan, we have no choice but to set the prices higher,” Yonemitsu told Nikkei Asia .

While the relative lightness of the yen may have something to do with these tiered pricing models, Rhys ap Gwilym, a senior lecturer in economics at Bangor University and co-author of an article with Osti about tourist taxes, thinks the social and economic profiles of travelers themselves probably also play a role.

“The international tourist has probably spent a lot of money on travel and is likely to be richer than your average local. But secondly, they may be on a trip of a lifetime, and they’re going to be less price sensitive than the local would be,” explained ap Gwilym. “Those are two good reasons why firms are going to look at tourists, particularly international tourists, and think, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity for us to charge a higher price and they’re likely to be less price sensitive.’”

Cities such as Paris and Amsterdam also have recently raised tourist taxes. This year, Venice implemented a daily visitation fee that applies to foreigners and non-Venetian Italians alike, with the express goal of challenging overtourism.

“In the past, when establishing tourism taxes, thought was given to how much visitors could be charged without losing them. Now, many places are not only okay with losing them, they are charging visitors so that fewer will come,” McCole said. “This is the new part. Residents in some destinations are seriously challenging the ‘more is better’ philosophy, and ‘taxes’ in all their forms can help to reduce visitation.”

$5 for locals, $30 for tourists: Japan tourist boom prompts pricing divide

New York City is still waiting for its high-spending tourists to come back

NYC tourism is on the rebound, expecting a 70% increase in tourists this year.
New hotels, a busy Broadway, and a casino-to-come in Times Square are bringing tourism back to life.
But tourism likely won't reach pre-pandemic levels for several years, remaining a pain point in the city's recovery.

New York City wants its tourists back.

The city has come a long way since its days in spring 2020 as the epicenter of the coronavirus, when local businesses shuttered their doors and the lights in Time Square dimmed. Two years later, real estate is booming , the city's most iconic cocktail bars have lines of people waiting to get in , and young professionals are flocking back to the city .

Tourists are also frequenting Central Park and the Empire State building again, but the city still has a long way to go before it reaches pre-pandemic tourism levels.

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Japan gets more than it bargained for with tourist boom

Can the country welcome 60 million visitors a year without losing its culture -- and its mind?

TOKYO/KYOTO -- Yuko Kato, a 50-year-old housewife, was raised in Kyoto and has lived there all her life. Going to the 1,300-year-old Nishiki Market, known as "Kyoto's Kitchen," to buy fish, pickles and seasonings used to be a weekly habit for her, but that has changed over the past five years.

These days, the traditional retail market, which covers five blocks of narrow laneways lined with shops, is overrun by foreign tourists, many of them eating skewered shrimp and other local delicacies as they stroll, making it difficult for daily shoppers to go about their business. Posters saying "No Eating While Walking" are pasted everywhere, but are largely ignored.

Airbnb begins to recover in Japan, a year after crackdown

Japan experienced 5.8% increase in foreign visitors in march, foreigners' unpaid bills give japanese hospitals a headache, rural japan counts on anime 'holy sites' to lure foreign tourists, japan's booking-site clampdown exposes industry's arm-twisting, flood of inbound tourism must not swamp japan, latest on the big story, thailand's marriage equality a rare win in asia's fight for lgbtq rights, ai's looming climate cost: energy demand surges amid data center race, modi's election setback follows campaign focused on india's foreign relations, sponsored content, about sponsored content this content was commissioned by nikkei's global business bureau..

Nikkei Asian Review, now known as Nikkei Asia, will be the voice of the Asian Century.

Global tourism industry - statistics & facts

What are the leading global tourism destinations, digitalization of the global tourism industry, how important is sustainable tourism, key insights.

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Total contribution of travel and tourism to GDP worldwide 2019-2034

Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide 1950-2023

Global leisure travel spend 2019-2022

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Leading global travel markets by travel and tourism contribution to GDP 2019-2022

Travel and tourism employment worldwide 2019-2034

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Basic Statistic Total contribution of travel and tourism to GDP worldwide 2019-2034
Basic Statistic Travel and tourism: share of global GDP 2019-2034
Basic Statistic Leading global travel markets by travel and tourism contribution to GDP 2019-2022
Basic Statistic Global leisure travel spend 2019-2022
Premium Statistic Global business travel spending 2001-2022
Premium Statistic Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide 1950-2023
Basic Statistic Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide 2005-2023, by region
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Travel and tourism: share of global GDP 2019-2034

Share of travel and tourism's total contribution to GDP worldwide in 2019 and 2023, with a forecast for 2024 and 2034

Total contribution of travel and tourism to GDP in leading travel markets worldwide in 2019 and 2022 (in billion U.S. dollars)

Leisure tourism spending worldwide from 2019 to 2022 (in billion U.S. dollars)

Global business travel spending 2001-2022

Expenditure of business tourists worldwide from 2001 to 2022 (in billion U.S. dollars)

Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide from 1950 to 2023 (in millions)

Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide 2005-2023, by region

Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide from 2005 to 2023, by region (in millions)

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Premium Statistic Global hotel and resort industry market size worldwide 2022-2023
Premium Statistic Most valuable hotel brands worldwide 2023, by brand value
Basic Statistic Leading hotel companies worldwide 2023, by number of properties
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Premium Statistic Number of hotel rooms in the construction pipeline worldwide 2024
Premium Statistic Countries with the most hotel construction projects in the pipeline worldwide 2024

Global hotel and resort industry market size worldwide 2022-2023

Market size of the hotel and resort industry worldwide in 2022 and 2023 (in trillion U.S. dollars)

Most valuable hotel brands worldwide 2023, by brand value

Leading hotel brands based on brand value worldwide in 2023 (in billion U.S. dollars)

Leading hotel companies worldwide 2023, by number of properties

Leading hotel companies worldwide as of June 2023, by number of properties

Number of hotels in the construction pipeline worldwide 2024

Number of hotels in the construction pipeline worldwide as of the first quarter of 2024

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Number of hotel rooms in the construction pipeline worldwide as of the first quarter of 2024

Countries with the most hotel construction projects in the pipeline worldwide 2024

Countries with the highest number of hotel construction projects in the pipeline worldwide as of the first quarter of 2024

Premium Statistic Airports with the most international air passenger traffic worldwide 2022
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Premium Statistic Global passenger rail users forecast 2017-2028
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Premium Statistic Number of users of car rentals worldwide 2019-2028
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Premium Statistic Carbon footprint of international tourism transport worldwide 2005-2030, by type

Airports with the most international air passenger traffic worldwide 2022

Leading airports for international air passenger traffic in 2022 (in million international passengers)

Market value of selected airlines worldwide 2023

Market value of selected airlines worldwide as of May 2023 (in billion U.S. dollars)

Global passenger rail users forecast 2017-2028

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Number of users of car rentals worldwide from 2019 to 2028 (in millions)

Number of users in selected countries in the Car Rentals market in 2023

Number of users in selected countries in the Car Rentals market in 2023 (in million)

Carbon footprint of international tourism transport worldwide 2005-2030, by type

Transport-related emissions from international tourist arrivals worldwide in 2005 and 2016, with a forecast for 2030, by mode of transport (in million metric tons of carbon dioxide)

Attractions

Premium Statistic Leading museums by highest attendance worldwide 2019-2022
Basic Statistic Most visited amusement and theme parks worldwide 2019-2022
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Leading amusement and theme parks worldwide from 2019 to 2022, by attendance (in millions)

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Number of monuments on the UNESCO world heritage list as of September 2023, by type

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Number of Michelin-starred restaurants in selected countries and territories worldwide as of July 2023

Online travel market

Premium Statistic Online travel market size worldwide 2017-2028
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Market cap of leading online travel companies worldwide as of September 2023 (in million U.S. dollars)

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Estimated enterprise value to EBITDA (EV/EBITDA) ratio in the online travel market worldwide as of April 2024, by segment

Selected trends

Premium Statistic Global travelers who believe in the importance of green travel 2023
Premium Statistic Sustainable initiatives travelers would adopt worldwide 2022, by region
Premium Statistic Airbnb revenue worldwide 2017-2023
Premium Statistic Airbnb nights and experiences booked worldwide 2017-2023
Premium Statistic Technologies global hotels plan to implement in the next three years 2022
Premium Statistic Hotel technologies global consumers think would improve their future stay 2022

Global travelers who believe in the importance of green travel 2023

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Airbnb revenue worldwide 2017-2023

Revenue of Airbnb worldwide from 2017 to 2023 (in billion U.S. dollars)

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Technologies global hotels plan to implement in the next three years 2022

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Hotel technologies global consumers think would improve their future stay 2022

Must-have hotel technologies to create a more amazing stay in the future among travelers worldwide as of 2022

Premium Statistic Travel and tourism revenue worldwide 2019-2028, by segment
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Outbound tourism visitor growth worldwide from 2020 to 2022, with a forecast until 2025, by region

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Planet Money

The boom and bust of iceland's tourism bubble.

Cardiff Garcia

Alexi Horowitz, photographed for NPR, 2 August 2022, in New York, NY. Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya for NPR.

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

The now-defunct budget airline WOW got Iceland hooked on tourism. The island nation's economy was reshaped by the tourism boom, and WOW's bankruptcy is changing things again.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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How antarctica’s tourist boom could affect earth’s ‘last great wilderness’.

William Brangham William Brangham

Emily Carpeaux Emily Carpeaux

Mike Fritz Mike Fritz

Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-antarcticas-tourist-boom-could-affect-earths-last-great-wilderness

Watch Part 4

Can Antarctica remain a refuge for science and peace?

Antarctica was the last of the seven continents to be discovered, and it wasn’t until the late 1950s that commercial tourism began there. But now, Antarctica has become a popular travel destination, amid growing concerns about the effect that increasing numbers of people could have on its pristine environment. William Brangham reports from Antarctica.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

Now to our continuing series Warnings From Antarctica.

It was the last of the seven continents to be discovered, and it wasn't until the late 1950s that commercial tourism to the region began. But now it's becoming a popular destination.

William Brangham and producers Mike Fritz and Emily Carpeaux traveled there and have this report on how tourism has thus far shown little impact on Antarctica's pristine environment, but why there is growing concern about the influx of more and more people.

William Brangham:

Welcome to the tourist boom at the bottom of the world. It's a front-row seat to a remarkable show, majestic humpback whales, frolicking fur seals, an army of curious, charming penguins.

All that framed by a backdrop that defies description, nothing but miles of mountains, glaciers and icebergs as far a the eye can see. The icy continent of Antarctica is hot. A record 50,000 people came last year. "GQ" magazine recently said now is the time to go. The New York Times said, forget Times Square. Ring in the new year right here.

David McGonigal:

The main attraction of the area is just, it's a place where people are irrelevant. People just don't count. You're coming here purely as a visitor. You have no other impact.

David McGonigal has led over 120 trips to Antarctica for One Ocean Expeditions, a Canadian tour company promoting environmentally conscious travel.

These are trips where the scenery comes with equal helpings of science and history. This is definitely not budget travel. It's about $12,000 to $20,000 per person for this two-week cruise. That includes kayaking, hiking, and motorboat excursions by day, white tablecloth meals, and lectures from scientists and naturalists by night.

McGonigal's job is to keep the roughly 140 passengers, who have come from around the world, safe and satisfied.

Some people are just down here for the history, and so you have got to find some historical elements to deliver. Some people just want wildlife. Some people are really just down here for the ice. And it's a matter of juggling that all around and then trying to pull together a plan.

The journey starts at the southern tip of South America, and through the infamous Drake Passage, home to some of the roughest seas known to man.

Two days later, the ship finally crosses the Antarctic Circle, one of the southernmost latitudes on Earth.

Hermione Roff:

This sort of place, it deepens your understanding of the world, but also of yourself.

Hermione and Jon Roff made the trip from Northern England. She's a child and family therapist. He's an Anglican priest.

We wanted to come and see it before either it disappeared or we disappeared.

We are probably spending more on this holiday than we have spent on our holidays in our entire lives.

Is that right?

Yes, I think so.

Yusuf Hashim retired almost 20 years ago. He was a marketing director for Shell Oil in Malaysia. He convinced nearly 50 of his friends and family to join him on this trip.

So, what are you doing here on the bottom of the Earth?

Yusuf Hashim:

Spending my children's inheritance.

Do they know that this is what is happening?

Yes, that's one of them over there. So it's bonding time. I have been here four times now, and I will never tire of looking at icebergs and penguins and the scenery. It makes it all worth living.

In addition to all the wildlife, the ship visits historic sites, like this abandoned British scientific base from the 1950s, as well as active bases. Eleven scientists from Ukraine work and live here year-round.

And the tourists can sample the homemade whisky made with glacial ice at one of the southernmost drinking holes in the world. But visiting Antarctica until relatively recently was a trip no human had ever made.

Katie Murray:

It's absolutely incredible that our seventh continent, our newest continent, was discovered less than 200 years ago, changing what we understand about the globe today.

Katie Murray is a polar historian who works for One Ocean, teaching visitors about the earliest Antarctic explorers, like Britain's James Cook, or the ill-fated race to the South Pole in 1911 between Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, or perhaps the most famous Antarctic adventure story, Ernest Shackleton's dramatic endurance voyage several years later.

We talked with Murray in the ship's movie theater.

It's quite incredible, actually, that 100 years after the Heroic Age, just over 100 years since Scott and the polar party died on their return from the South Pole, and you have got these great stories of endurance and suffering, we can now come to Antarctica effectively for fun.

This record number of tourists coming here has been growing steadily since the 1980s, when just a few thousand made the trip every year.

And when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Soviet fleet of ice-strengthened vessels became available, and people realized they could actually charter those and bring those down. That was what started the whole rush in the 1990s.

Today, more and more tour companies are rolling out new fleets of luxury ice-strengthened ships capable of navigating the icy waters here. But the arrival of more and more visitors to Antarctica is also leading to concerns about their impact on this pristine ecosystem.

Claire Christian:

Antarctica is really the world's last great wilderness. There's no permanent human population there.

It's a continent that is for nature, and I think that's a really important symbol, because so many other places where human civilization has spread to, we have destroyed the environment.

Claire Christian is the executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. She believes tourism has so far been a force for good, galvanizing people to care about a continent that is thousands of miles from their homes.

Right now, tourists only visit the Antarctic Peninsula, because it's the most accessible and most scenic part of the continent, but Christian notes this is also a region stressed by climate change. So, how many more visitors can the region handle?

Right now, there may not — it may not be able to — we may not be able to see a lot of effects. But, if you suddenly have a sharp increase in the number of people who are visiting a small colony every day, that might start to have an impact.

Remember, Antarctica has no government. No nation runs this place. And, currently, all tour groups are governed by a strict, but voluntary set of regulations.

For example, only one ship at a time is allowed at designated sites. There are rules about how many people can go ashore and how close they can get to wildlife. One Ocean Expeditions mandates all tourists vacuum and clean their gear before going ashore, so that no foreign seeds or dirt end up on land. All returning gear gets a similar scrub every day.

But invasive species have already taken hold. This moss is from the Arctic. A trace amount somehow made the 12,000-mile trip. And there are also concerns about wildlife. Two of the three penguin species on the peninsula are in decline. Researchers believe it's being driven in part by a warming environment.

Given that, are all these humans an added stress? You see all that reddish brown material on the ground behind me? That's all penguin guano, or penguin poop. And not only does it make this whole area have a very unique aroma, but scientists have been measuring the stress hormones that are released into guano at places where tourists show up and at places where tourists never go.

And for the penguins so far, at least, it doesn't seem that the presence of tourism is causing them any problems.

Andrea Raya Rey is a conservation biologist based in Ushuaia, Argentina, a city where the bulk of all Antarctic tourism begins.

Raya Rey says that, while tourism is showing little impact thus far, she worries about the estimated 40 percent growth in the industry.

Andrea Raya Rey:

The tourism puts an extra pressure on the ecosystem. One ship, it's OK, two, OK, three. But 10 at the same time pointing at them, it's stressful.

It's also a concern shared by those within the tourism industry.

It's going to be more a matter of just, how do you manage the numbers when there's just nowhere left to go and you have got more ships coming down?

As for visitors like Jon and Hermione Roff, they feel incredibly lucky to have seen the wonders of Antarctica up close. But they admit that they are worried about their own impact.

There is a growth of tourism that does leave a mark. However careful we are, it leaves a mark. And so it's a very difficult balance. I mean, I'm really thrilled that we have come, but I hope not too many more people will come.

For now, though, there is no sign that this tourist boom is slowing.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm William Brangham on the Antarctic Peninsula.

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William Brangham is an award-winning correspondent, producer, and substitute anchor for the PBS News Hour.

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My own private Iceland

Tourism has never been “authentic.”

by Kyle Chayka

A waterfall in Iceland with a rainbow arc.

There’s a place in Iceland where you can see the northern lights any time of year, regardless of the weather. You don’t have to ride a snowmobile into the mountains or rent a glass-roofed igloo. You don’t even need a winter jacket.

Leaning back in my recliner, I gaze upward at the ethereal reds, greens, and blues arcing across the sky, wavering like alien signals, an extraterrestrial message that we don’t know how to decode. I’m struck by their closeness. The bands of color appear right above me, like I could reach out and pass my hand through them.

These northern lights are glowing at 1 p.m. on an 8K resolution screen inside a well-heated IMAX planetarium at Perlan, a natural history museum set on a hill above downtown Reykjavik. Every hour on the hour the planetarium plays Áróra , a 22-minute-long documentary with footage of the lights taken from all over Iceland. The screen’s pixel density is so high that it runs up against the limits of what the human eye can perceive. The digital image might be clearer than reality. It’s definitely more convenient. All you need is a $20 ticket.

Places like Perlan — magnets for visitors and secondary representations of the country’s natural charms — are increasingly a necessity for Iceland, which in recent years has become synonymous with the term “overtourism.” Overtourism is what happens to a place when an avalanche of tourists “changes the quality of life for people who actually live there,” says Andrew Sheivachman, an editor at the travel website Skift, whose 2016 report about Iceland established the term. In other words, Sheivachman says, “a place becomes mainstream.” Iceland has about 300,000 residents, but it received more than 2.3 million overnight visitors last year. Tourists have flooded the island, crashing their camper vans in the wilderness, pooping in the streets of Reykjavik, and eroding the scenic canyon Fjaðrárgljúfur, where Justin Bieber shot a music video in 2015, forcing it to close temporarily. No wonder the museum is safer.

Overtourism also comes with a kind of stigma signified by that word “mainstream.” A reputation for excessive crowds means the tastemaking travel elite actually start avoiding a place, like a too-popular restaurant. “The early-adopter travelers are already onto the next cool, cheap, relatively intact place,” Sheivachman says. Since the Skift article, the term has been widely applied to places like Barcelona, Venice, and Tulum to suggest that no one who’s in the know would want to go there anymore.

Popular tourist destination Geysir is actually a collection of several different geysers that periodically erupt to cheers from the rings of tourists trying to snap photographs and selfies.

Such is the case with Iceland. From 2013 to 2017 the country saw tourist numbers rising more than 20 percent annually, but in 2018 and for projections into the near future, it looks more like 5 percent. There’s a sense that the tourists took all the Instagrams of waterfalls and glaciers they wanted and then left, leaving the Icelandic economy vulnerable. In 2017, 42 percent of the country’s export revenue was tourism, meaning that Iceland’s biggest product, larger than its fishing and aluminum industries, is itself. There are both too many tourists and not enough; Wow Air, one of the major conduits of Icelandic tourism, declared bankruptcy in March after an unsustainable expansion.

While traveling in Iceland this spring to talk to Icelanders about the boom and subsequent slowdown, however, I began to doubt the concept of overtourism itself. The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them. It poses tourists as foreign entities to a place in the same way that viruses are foreign to the human body. From the visitor’s side, overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people — like yourself — who don’t belong in a place.

There are more tourists now than ever before: The World Tourism Organization counted 1.4 billion international tourists in 2018 and predicts 1.8 billion by 2030. In terms of creating new tourists, developing countries are growing the fastest. Even the Icelandic “collapse,” as Bloomberg described it , seems to be more of a pause; Wow Air plans to relaunch late this year. If fully one-fifth of humanity are traveling away from home, then how foreign are tourists, after all? Tourism is not a localized phenomenon that we encounter in crowded piazzas and then leave but an omnipresent condition, like climate change or the internet, that we inhabit all the time. Maybe we need to accept it.

Watching Áróra in Perlan’s theater, I sit in the dark surrounded by empty seats while a disembodied female narrator with an Icelandic accent explains how the various colors of the northern lights come from the vibrations of different atmospheric gases hit by electrons. It strikes me that it doesn’t matter that I’m not seeing the actual northern lights; the season ended just before my arrival anyway. I am here in Iceland — surely that makes it a little more real than seeing it in New York? And besides, I’m not damaging any glaciers or emitting gas fumes. In the era of overtourism, the digital display isn’t just responsible. It’s authentic.

Iceland might be the modern symbol of overtourism, but it was hardly the first or only victim of tourists. The tradition of the Grand Tour started around the 17th century: British nobility would take a spin around the classical sites of the European continent after university, before settling down. Hordes of young men traipsed through Italy, returning with oil portraits of themselves amid castles or ruins to document the journey for their friends back home. In a journal published in 1766 , the Scottish author Tobias Smollett complained of carriages packed with travelers on the Tour route: You “run the risk of being stifled among very indifferent company.” In Rome, Smollett also observed his compatriots acting badly:

“[A] number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt: ignorant, petulant, rash, and profligate without any knowledge or experience of their own.”

It’s an 18th-century description of overtourism that’s still applicable today. But now the scale is vast and extreme, a hyperobject of loutishness enabled by cheap flights and social media. Tourists seem to be ruining tourism everywhere. Geographical places have been reduced to disposable trends.

Nature is delicate in Iceland. Tourists are fenced onto pathways so as not to disturb plants including the signature local moss, which can take decades to grow back.

Over the past year, headlines have presented a litany of the absurd ways that we’re wrecking the places we attempt to appreciate. Indonesia’s Komodo Island considered closing because people keep stealing the lizards; Greece’s Santorini posted signs asking visiting Instagrammers to stop trespassing on scenic rooftops; selfie-takers ruined fields of tulips in the Netherlands as well as California’s poppy super bloom ; and Peru instituted timed tickets to Machu Picchu to stop the archaeological site from being trampled into nonexistence.

The crowds can even cause a kind of overtourism rage. Last year, two visitors beat each other up trying to take photos at Rome’s Trevi fountain and local protestors stormed a tourist bus in Barcelona, agitating against the invasion of the city by travelers. Venice, the most tragic victim of overtourism, recently instituted a new entrance tax to compensate for the damage the sinking city suffers; each visitor requires a daily fee of €3 to €10, depending on the expected traffic.

The pace of tourism fads also seems to have accelerated. One year the popular place to go is Berlin, the next it’s Iceland, then Lisbon, Bali, Mexico City, Dubrovnik, or Athens. Suddenly everyone is Instagramming from the same place, reproducing the same cliche images . In part, the speed is because of media, both print and digital. Travel and lifestyle magazines have long sold the dream of the next hot destination, from Conde Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure to GQ , Vogue , and Monocle . The New York Times’ “ 36 Hours In… ” and “ 52 Places to Go ” series instantly become #goals. Guides published by Eater (also owned by Vox Media), Goop , and the content farm Culture Trip occupy online search results.

“How deep do you have to dig before you start seeing places that would really be something special?”

These tips expire quickly in the age of overtourism; you have to follow them while the spots are still semi-obscure in order to cash in your cultural capital — before they’re pictured on Tinder profiles above the words “Travel is my life.” Tourism is competitive. “The places where the magazine editors go, they’re quick to turn them into something, then quick to declare them over,” says Colin James Nagy, head of strategy at the agency Fred & Farid and a travel tastemaker himself. “In Tulum, that happened in five years.” New York magazine declared the Mexican beach town “dead” in February 2019. Nagy suggests instead Denmark’s Faroe Islands, Todos Santos in Mexico, and Dakar, Senegal, as up-and-comers. No doubt they’ll be deemed dead soon, too.

The ephemeral trendiness — travel as fast fashion — is part of a structural change in the tourism industry, according to Stanislav Ivanov, professor of tourism economics at Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management. Centuries ago, Grand Tour trips would take up to three years; you could stay in Rome for six to eight weeks alone. In the 20th century, traditional travel agents and tour operators offered pre-packaged trips that encouraged a sense of loyalty to particular places or hospitality brands, which tourists would return to repeatedly. There was less variety and more consistency. But since the 2000s, any traveler can easily use an “online travel agency,” or OTA, like Expedia or Booking.com and visit a new place every holiday. “People are collecting destinations,” Ivanov says. “Loyalty is not toward the hotels or destinations but toward the distributors.”

Plug in your travel dates and an OTA will serve you a long list of possible flights from various carriers, plus bonus car and hotel rentals and activity suggestions. OTAs were once cheaper and considerably smoother than direct booking; many companies have since upgraded their digital services, but the preference for OTAs remains. In the end, the service is less personalized and more automated.

Operating at a massive scale with call centers full of staff who may not know much about a traveler’s destination, OTAs end up serving the same itineraries over and over, according to Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson, the director-general of the Icelandic Tourism Board and a vehement critic of the digital platforms. They create what he calls a “top 10” list effect, reducing a country or city to a series of boxes to check off. OTAs “don’t give a damn about what’s really happening” in a place, Steinarsson says. “They are just shoveling out packages.”

A tourist on an Iceland shopping street hugs a large stuffed polar bear white getting their picture taken. Other tourists wait their turn to pose.

The problem is particularly acute in Iceland because so much of its tourism is routed through packaged bus trips; charting your own route with a rental car is both more expensive and more forbidding due to the weather, terrain, and not-insignificant chance of, say, getting stuck in a river . So visitors are most likely to succumb to convenience and take a spin around the Golden Circle, a 190-mile loop through the southern uplands that features the geysers, waterfalls, and rocky cliffs that everyone posts on Instagram or Facebook — the same spots that are sustaining the most damage. “If you go to Iceland, you have to do that list. ‘Go onto our site, it’s on the front screen, just take out your credit card, pay, get it over with, and start enjoying,’” Steinarsson says. “How deep do you have to dig before you start seeing places that would really be something special?”

Where we go and how we get there are increasingly influenced by a series of digital platforms — not just big OTAs, but Airbnb, Yelp, and Instagram — that prioritize engagement over originality. Overtourism is a consequence, not a cause. The more often a particular destination or package proves successful, the more users a site’s algorithm will drive to it, intensifying the problem by pushing travelers to have the same experiences as one another on a single beaten track around the globe, updated and optimized in real time. When one spot gets too crowded and its novelty used up, the next is slotted into its place.

For my trip, I decide to take the path of least resistance, relying on OTAs and recommendation sites to tell me exactly what to do — a tourist experience as well as an experience of tourism. It is indeed frictionless. I book an apartment in downtown Reykjavik through Airbnb and day-trips through Arctic Adventures, a local OTA. I buy tickets for a tour of Game of Thrones shooting locations and a day-long Golden Circle trip that hits all the main spectacles. Every activity seems to be rated 4.5 stars out of 5 or above. Weeks before my Icelandair flight, I’m algorithmically bombarded on YouTube by hypnotic pre-roll ads for the northern lights.

On the plane, I’m forced to watch a three-minute trailer for Iceland before I can even access the entertainment system. The flight map shows me why the country is such a tourism target. The frozen ovoid island is like a period in a chain of ellipses linking North America to the United Kingdom, Europe, and Scandinavia, making it a perfect stopover point. Iceland has no native inhabitants; in a sense, everyone has been a tourist since Norwegian and Swedish Viking sailors started accidentally landing there in the ninth century and settled when they found out the summer wasn’t so bad. Anything that exists on the island is a result of its visitors, making it difficult to determine where the “real” Iceland ends and where tourism begins.

It’s dangerous to take selfies at Gullfoss. One wrong move and you could plunge into the ravine, where “it’s impossible to find you,” says Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson of the Icelandic Tourism Bureau.

Almost every flight passes through Keflavik airport outside Reykjavik, by far the largest city, which functions like a fire hose, spitting out tourists. Icelandair has been offering free layovers through Keflavik since 1955 but only began marketing them aggressively in 1996 as it added destinations in North America, branding the country as a quick drop-in. The 2000s brought marketing campaigns including one with the euphemistic slogan “ Fancy a dirty weekend in Iceland? ” showing a photo of a couple with geothermal-bath mud on their faces.

In 2008, the financial crisis sunk Iceland’s previously expensive currency, which was terrible for Icelanders but great for tourism — the income from added visitors sped up economic recovery. “People were flocking there because it has a very high standard of living, it’s very beautiful, and now you could get it for one-third of the price,” Michael Raucheisen, Icelandair’s US-based communications manager for North America, tells me. Raucheisen, who flew Icelandair with his German father as a child, has worked at the company for two decades. “Nineteen years ago, people had no idea where Iceland was,” he says. “They thought Icelandair was an air-conditioning company.”

Iceland is also located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the crack between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, making it one of the most volcanic spots on earth. Beginning in the early 1900s, Icelanders harnessed this energy as geothermal and hydropower for heat and electricity, making it much more comfortable than in chilly centuries past. Ninety-nine percent of the primary energy use in Iceland now comes from local renewable sources. The countryside is dotted with natural hot springs and futuristic power plants, all gently leaking steam. The place is a planetary Juul. (Reykjavik’s name, given in 874, means “smoke cove.”)

The condition of overtourism pressures places to become commodities in the global marketplace the same way we warp our lifestyles to attract Instagram “Likes”

A volcano was in fact the biggest spark for the tourism boom. In April 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, grounding more European flights than at any time since World War II, though in Iceland its impact was limited to the evacuation of a few farms and about 800 people . The eruption put maps and videos of Iceland on primetime TV news around the world, which amounted to free advertising. “Even during the volcano, the rest of Iceland was clean and beautiful. It was like, ‘Oh, it’s there, I didn’t know that,’” says Inga Hlín Pálsdóttir, the cheerful director of the tourism initiative Visit Iceland. The eruption happened, by chance, just as Pálsdóttir was helping to launch the country’s biggest tourism marketing push yet. “It was basically crisis communication,” she says. Several weeks of her life blurred together, but the campaign succeeded.

Iceland became a year-round destination, not just the warm months. Summer had been peak season; now, more tourists come for winter and the “shoulder seasons” between peak and off-peak, thanks in part to marketing campaigns highlighting the northern lights, festivals, and outdoor activities. American tourists gradually surpassed the German and French groups that traditionally came for long hiking trips. Tourists from Asia are now the fastest-growing demographic.

My first stop after Keflavik is the Blue Lagoon, a short, sparsely filled bus ride away. It’s recognizable from photos: a luminous pool of bright-blue water, like an aqueous latte, set amid jagged black volcanic rocks. But rather than the idyllic natural hot spring it resembles on Instagram, it’s actually a kind of giant artificial bathtub filled with wastewater from a nearby geothermal power plant. The Svartsengi power plant opened in 1976 and its superheated liquid and steam bubbled up through the surrounding lava field; one psoriasis patient bathed in it and saw an improvement and thus a business began.

Blue Lagoon built a cement-bottomed pool that spreads out in a faux-organic layout and a clutch of modernist spa buildings. In 2017, the site accommodated 1.2 million visitors who buy timed entrance tickets and pay extra for bathrobes and drinks at the lagoon’s float-up bar. “Can you imagine how many people have sex in it?” the Icelandic politician Birgitta Jonsdottir later asks me. The 240°C water that gets pumped from deep underground is so mineral-heavy, however, that no bacteria can survive, even after it gets cooled down to bathing temperature for visitors to soak in.

I get a wristband for locker access and cash-free payments then make my way through the bustling locker rooms. Guards in all-black uniforms yell at guests for not showering nude and scrubbing down according to Icelandic hygiene, helpfully illustrated by explicit diagrams. The hot water is a fast cure for my jet lag but the lagoon feels like a crowded hot tub. The first thing I notice after I get a plastic goblet of prosecco and smear my face with some local silica — filtered out of seawater by precipitation and served up in a bucket — is just how international the crowd is. An Indian family snaps selfies, holding each other’s drinks. A German man asks me to take a photo of his friend and send it to him, maybe because I had followed the advice of travel blogs and squeezed my phone into a nerdy waterproof bag strung around my neck. I hear as much Chinese as English.

Tourists pose behind a painted outline of Vikings with only their faces uncovered. Another tourist snaps their picture.

An American man floating by declaims to his friends, “Can you imagine if we built a concept like this in Las Vegas?” And that’s exactly what the Blue Lagoon is: a concept, a playground-Iceland that can be consumed at will, something packaged and branded as representative of the place despite its artificiality. (One Trip Advisor review deems it “ expensive and fake .”)

The rest of the resort follows the same logic. When I begin feeling like a wobbly sous-vide egg I wade out of the water, shower again, and go inside for my reservation at Lava, an upscale restaurant where one wall is polished lava-rock and two others are floor-to-ceiling glass. Guests in the same white robes as mine dot the tables like hospital patients in a waiting room. I order the $50 two-course set menu that features local lamb. It tastes transcendentally gamey and like nowhere else on Earth, literally, because Icelandic sheep were first brought to the island 1,000 years ago and left alone to evolve in uniquely delicious ways.

The condition of overtourism pressures places to become commodities in the global marketplace the same way we warp our lifestyles to attract Instagram “Likes.” “You have to compete as a brand,” Pálsdóttir tells me. Countries and cities must constantly perform their identities in order to maintain the flow of tourists.

Icelandic tourism is a paradox. Visitors might outnumber locals, but the place must take care to preserve the brand of lonely natural grandeur that has become its product, offered up like a dish of roast lamb belly. The maintenance of this image is its own kind of artificiality. Fun fact: If an Icelandic horse ever leaves the island, it isn’t allowed to come back.

My Reykjavik Airbnb was listed on the website as a penthouse, but that’s not hard to achieve when few buildings are more than three stories tall. It’s polished and pleasantly anonymous without lacking personality entirely; above the TV there’s a giant photo print of the Brooklyn Bridge. From the balcony on one side I can see the white specter of Snæfellsjökull, a glacier-capped stratovolcano, across the chilled blue of Faxa Bay. On the other is downtown Reykjavik, like an overgrown ski town, with the skeletons of new hotels and high-rise glassy condos under construction on the outskirts.

Though Airbnb initially helped the growth of Icelandic tourism by housing visitors while development was only in planning, the government instituted a new regulation in January 2017 limiting most short-term rentals to 90 days a year; more than that and the owners need special certification. My place clearly falls into the latter category, since the owner rents out the building’s two penthouse apartments full-time and lives in a unit below them. The apartment is on a quieter stretch of the main shopping strip, Laugavegur, sprinkled with storefronts selling outdoor gear, souvenir puffin dolls, and Viking kitsch. It’s easy to tell tourists apart from the locals because they wear brightly colored Gore-Tex coats despite the relative warmth, and wander aimlessly, unsure of where they’re going. When I go out I try to wear a casual jacket and carry a tote bag instead of a backpack, wanting, illogically, to be disguised.

Reykjavik sometimes resembles an overgrown ski town. Vast mountain ranges loom immediately over the rooftops, reminding visitors of the city’s isolation.

These days, Reykjavik is full of the kinds of signifiers that mark an “authentic” travel experience, at least according to the influencer set: artisanal coffee shops like Reykjavik Roasters, locavore restaurants like Skál, and shops with names like “Nomad.store” selling minimalist coffee-table books and scented candles. None of these things are bad, necessarily, but they’re also not particularly local to Iceland in the first place. Unlike Paris, for example, where the centuries-old urban culture is what attracts visitors, Reykjavik developed in tandem with tourism.

“I grew up in the city center and I remember the streets used to be empty. It was a small fraction of the cafes and restaurants you have now,” says Karen María Jónsdóttir, at the time the director of Visit Reykjavik, the marketing office for the city. We’re sitting in The Coocoo’s Nest, a homey farm-to-table bar-slash-restaurant in the harbor neighborhood, where old fishermen’s supply sheds are being turned into boutiques and food halls in a familiar flavor of industrial gentrification. We drink two fashionably non-alcoholic lemonade cocktails at the wood bar. Icelanders used to only go out on the weekends and shop at outlet malls outside the city; now things are open all week long. “You need a certain mass of people to [sustain] a selection of good restaurants and services for everybody,” Jónsdóttir says. “We all want the services but then we complain about the people using them.”

Gunnar Jóhannesson, a professor at the University of Iceland who studies tourism, tells me about a recent survey: the closer to the center of Reykjavik, the more positive locals are in their perception of tourists. We need to “re-humanize tourists and tourism,” Johannesson says. “It’s important to stop thinking about tourism as the other and realize that we are also tourists. Tourism is part of our society.” (After all, whenever Icelanders leave their small island, they’re tourists too: According to data sent to me by Visit Iceland, 83 percent of Icelanders traveled abroad for vacation in 2018.) There’s a “standardization” that follows global travel, the professor says, a wave of generically luxurious cafes, hotels, and food halls. “Maybe it’s a bit comforting. It shows that people like the same things.”

“It’s important to stop thinking about tourism as the other and realize that we are also tourists. Tourism is part of our society.”

Perhaps the problem isn’t the actual tourists but the way that some people — international entrepreneurs and developers in particular — profit from the tourism industry while others don’t. In other words, extractive capitalism is at fault, causing gentrification and displacement. “When tourism grows out of proportion, when it starts to be based on and motivated by international capital but not the community’s values, then we might have a problem,” Johannesson says. “I don’t think it has gotten to that point in Iceland, but it easily can get there.” Of course, it’s easier to say that on an island with plenty of extant empty space than at a Barcelona market so crowded with people Instagramming produce that residents can’t actually shop there.

Whether the balance has already tipped in favor of capital depends on who you ask. One evening I open Yelp and search the city for natural wine bars , which are the latest international hipster shibboleth and the 2010s update to Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of peace-via-globalization: Instead of McDonald’s, no two countries with natural wine bars will ever go to war with each other. I head to Port 9, down the alleyway of a residential complex. It’s a faux-industrial space with raw cement walls, hanging pendant lamps, and plush green-velvet banquettes, like every other cool bar . A piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich is playing. Wine connoisseurship is itself a recent import in Iceland; the country had a form of alcohol prohibition from 1915 to 1989, and beer is far more popular.

Sitting at the bar are two young men swirling glasses with the bartender. They are both musicians and graduate students in the whimsical, long-term manner enabled by Nordic socialism. They both recently moved back from Berlin, nostalgic for the Icelandic summer and nature in general. Markus Sigur Bjornsson is wiry and wry, dressed in streetwear, while Thorsteinn Eyfjord is taller, neck-scarved and more formal in manner. We discuss the state of the country over a funky Italian red pulled from under the bar. Bjornsson says he might not have ever left his home if it weren’t for exposure to tourists showing him that an outside world existed (Iceland is 93 percent Icelandic; the second largest demographic is Polish at 3 percent). “The tourism bubble, in 20 years we can look back and think, okay, this did more positive than negative to our society,” he says. In fact, as Elvar Orri Hreinsson, a research analyst at the Bank of Iceland, tells me, Iceland is more financially secure now than it used to be, even with the slowdown: The economy is more diversified, the central bank holds a large currency reserve, and foreign investors are more interested than ever.

Eyfjord is more pessimistic. Like most millennials, he feels a looming generational burden. If the bubble bursts, “we will have to take the blame and build up society again,” he says. But he has a plan. Without tourists, there will be a lot of empty hotels and Airbnbs. “I hope there will come a wave of squatting and the young people and artists will take over.” The spaces could be turned into affordable housing, art studios, and startup offices. “Then at least I can live alone without having to have help from my parents.”

Tourists on a street painted with rainbow stripes take pictures with their cellphones.

The rise of isolationist nationalism might slow it and climate change, accelerated by every plane flight, will change its targets, but as a global growth industry tourism doesn’t seem likely to stop. We can’t return to a time when overtourism didn’t exist, and the desire to do so is as problematic as the concept of overtourism itself: there’s prejudice at work when wealthy, white Westerners have been tourists, if not colonizers, for centuries, but now that the rest of the world is joining in, it’s cast as excessive. Rather, the task left to us is to imagine a post-overtourism world in which we can all participate in and benefit from the human flow.

I meet Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the 52-year-old former Icelandic Parliamentarian and onetime friend of Julian Assange, in a Fleetwood Mac-soundtracked hostel cafe that she suggests near her apartment in a quieter area east of downtown. Across the street, children bounce on a trampoline. As the former face of Iceland’s Pirate Party, a loose, global coalition of digital freedom activists that was the most popular political party in the country between 2015 and 2016, Jonsdottir is something of a celebrity. Icelandic style is usually sober; she has purple-tinged eyelashes, iridescent nails, dyed-blonde hair, and a set of chunky, biomorphic rings, a contrast to her anonymous black winter jacket.

While in Parliament, she tried to pass a bill that would tax new hotels and direct the funds toward Reykjavik itself but was stymied “because people in the countryside wanted their share of it,” she says. The funding would fight what she calls the “Disneyfication” of Reykjavik as well as help safeguard the area’s natural sites. “A lot of places I hold sacred in nature, places I would go to get some energy, there are so many people, so noisy, so disrespectful to the space they’re in, that I don’t go there anymore. I just get very upset,” she says. “You do not become sympathetic to other people’s cultures just tracking through it like a horde of oxen.”

She thinks we might need a different kind of tourism altogether. Rather than her old favorite spots that are now overrun, these days Jonsdottir prefers exploring her own backyard garden, a choice that’s both quieter and less damaging. She plants potatoes, like her family did in the village where she grew up. “I have a different experience every day because of the weather and the way the plants grow,” she says. “Look at the crisis we’re in with our planet. It’s time that people go on trips in their own area and say goodbye to the diversity that is there.”

There’s a blank-slate quality to Iceland, extending to the freshness of the air itself. The place has spun stories around itself since the Vikings wrote down their Sagas, tales of family lineages and heroic deeds, in the 12th century — some of which went on to inspire a novelist named George R.R. Martin. The landscape has had many things projected upon it. “There are different layers to the fantasy of Iceland,” the Icelandic novelist Andri Magnason tells me over dinner at Snaps, an old-school French bistro beloved by locals down the street from Hallgrímskirkja, the wave-like, expressionist church that is one of Reykjavik’s best-known symbols. “The Sagas are one layer, Game of Thrones is another layer, maybe the economy is another.”

Theo Hansson — graduate student, part-time Viking re-enactor, former Game of Thrones extra, and current Game of Thrones tour guide — gets ready for a tour on a recent Friday morning.

The fantasy can be the attraction. Early one morning I climb onto a coach bus familiar from childhood field trips for an eight-hour tour of Game of Thrones shooting locations. In the front of the bus sits our bearded guide, Theo Hansson, who is wearing a Night’s Watch outfit complete with faux-fur cape, drinking horn on his belt loop (I watch him fill it with coffee), and two actual swords, his long hair tied back with a bandana. Hansson explains that he worked as an extra on the show in various seasons playing a Watchman, an undead wight, and a wildling, braving thin costumes, recalcitrant horses, and very bad weather. Hansson speaks in a deep growl that’s half Hound rumble and half Littlefinger hiss; I assume it’s a put-on until he later speaks on the phone the same way, his voice shot from a day of narration. A Reykjavik native, in Hansson’s off-time he is an academic studying Viking history at the University of Iceland.

“I really, really hate tourists,” Hansson growls with feeling. “But you guys aren’t tourists. You’re Game of Thrones enthusiasts.” The tour happens the day after the finale of the television show, which I had stayed up very late Iceland time to watch, using a proxy to access American HBO. I’m the only one in the group to have done so, and so no one else is massively disappointed yet. I’m jealous.

On the bus are two-dozen other tourists, mostly American, including John and Marsha, an older couple from Buffalo, New York. They booked a free stopover through an OTA when it popped up as an option on their flights back home from Copenhagen, following a long cruise. “We never even thought of Iceland. I couldn’t even spell Reykjavik,” Marsha tells me. But it turned out their neighbor had just visited and loved it, then a woman they met on the Copenhagen flight suggested this specific tour. Marsha says she wishes they had planned to stay for a day longer.

“I really, really hate tourists. But you guys aren’t tourists. You’re Game of Thrones enthusiasts.”

Hansson swears a lot, tells repeated ex-girlfriend jokes, and puns incessantly. He’s had the gig since 2016. “This used to be a normal tour, then it became an R-rated tour,” he says. His humor has offended some groups, especially Germans, but his boss has been on the tour and loved it. In between anecdotes, we make our stops, like Thingvellir, where Vikings established Iceland’s first parliamentary government, the Althing, in the 10th century, in a ravine-ridden field where the earth is actively splitting apart. It’s also where Game of Thrones shot the Bloody Gate, an elaborate tiered guardhouse outside of the Eyrie castle, in season four. Hansson holds up laminated screenshots from the show that he printed out himself so that we can see the precise camera angle and observe that reality conforms to the image, except, of course, for the missing CGI gate. We ooh and aah.

Westeros is not a real place. Even the northern parts of the show were shot between Iceland, Scotland, and Ireland then spliced together as if they were contiguous. But we are tourists of the fiction regardless. Hansson brings us to Þjóðveldisbærinn Stöng, a replica of a Viking-era farm on a hilltop, where the show shot a Wildling raid. Hansson was in the scene; his job was to chase down a 6-year-old child. “I just kept stabbing her again and again and again. It was marvelous,” he says. Then he selects a volunteer from the audience and proceeds to demonstrate the stage-stabbing technique.

I drift away from the group and lean up against the grassy sod that covers the entire structure of the farmhouse to insulate it from the weather and cold. It starts to rain, but the grass shields me just enough so that I can look out into the gray mist over the surreal landscape, which stretches and pitches into hills and valleys like a skate park for giants. I feel briefly connected to some universal sentiment: the authentic dreariness of the Vikings and the Game of Thrones villagers alike.

My Golden Circle tour is more prosaic. I climb aboard another bus, this time filled with a group of quiet Norwegians and a single American family with two rambunctious kids; I’m the only solo traveler. Emil, the tour guide, has an affectless storytelling style, like a podcast of Wikipedia entries, much less appealing than Hansson’s profane patter. Whenever we stop, he seems more interested in talking to our otherwise silent driver, whose name he says is Gummy Bear, than explaining anything. On the itinerary is Thingvellir again, sans CGI; Geysir, the much-photographed clutch of geysers on a hillside; Gullfoss, an iconic waterfall; and the Secret Lagoon, a not-so-secret geothermal spring whose ironic slogan is “We Kept It Unique for You.”

Theo Hansson with one of his DIY printouts of Game of Thrones scenes that were shot in Iceland, this one at Thingvellir.

Geysir actually refers to the single Great Geyser, but that one only erupts around earthquakes. The star of the show is Strokkur (Icelandic for “churn”), which explodes every 10 minutes or so, causing a great gasp from the assembled visitors. Rings of tourists face backward and lean over the boiling-hot water in order to take possibly fatal selfies. Footprints mark a trodden path in the muddy hill that winds around each pool.

More than a natural wonder, it’s now something of a highway rest-stop, grandiose in its attempt to cater to tourists. On the other side of the road from the geysers is a sprawling visitor center, featuring a huge store selling clothing from the brand Geysir, one of Iceland’s most recognizable fashion labels, named after the place itself. The food court offers pizza as well as fish and chips readymade under heat lamps. Next door is a newly developed spa hotel, geyser-themed. Compared to the infrastructure, the waterworks themselves seem even smaller and less remarkable. I recall Markus Bjornsson, the student in the wine bar: “If you’ve seen one geyser, you’ve seen them all.”

Gullfoss — Golden Falls — is a mammoth crack in the earth through which runs 140 cubic meters of water per second. The gathered force is like a nuclear bomb but all the time. There were attempts to turn the falls into a hydroelectric power plant, but the story goes that the daughter of one of the farmers who own the land mounted a charismatic protest and saved it. Now there’s a beaten trail with staircases and handrails along the lip of the canyon where we could look down and take photos. Patches of grass that draw even closer to the edge are blocked off with signs. (“If you fall over, it’s impossible to find you, you’re just gone,” Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson of the ITB tells me.) We stand with our phones in front of our faces, the surging water too massive to consider as reality, as anything other than a picture that we can save to show friends later, shorn of its existential dread. I think of Don DeLillo’s description of “the most photographed barn in America” in his novel White Noise : “No one sees the barn.”

In the face of overtourism, I want to make an argument for the inauthentic. Not just the spots flooded with tourists but the simulations and the fictions, the ways that the world of tourism supersedes reality and becomes its own space. It is made up of the digital northern lights on an 8K movie screen, the manmade turquoise geothermal baths, and the computer renderings of high-budget television shows overlaid on the earth. I don’t regret any of these activities; in fact, the less authentic an experience was supposed to be in Iceland, the more fun I had and the more aware I was of the consequences of 21st-century travel.

This is not to discount the charm of hiking an empty mountain or the very real damage that tourists cause, disrupting lives and often intensifying local inequality. But maybe by reclaiming these experiences, or destigmatizing them, we can also begin regaining our agency over the rampant commodification of places and people. We can travel to see what exists instead of wishing for some mythical untouched state, the dream of a place prepared perfectly for visitors and yet empty of them. Instead of trying to “ live like a local ,” as Airbnb commands, we can just be tourists. When a destination is deemed dead might be the best time to go there, as the most accurate reflection of our impure world.

Tourists taking pictures in front of a spouting geyser.

Back at my Airbnb, I call Theo Hansson to see what he thought of the end of Game of Thrones . He was, like me, dissatisfied. “I’m very glad I was not a part of the last season. It would have soured everything,” he says. He doesn’t expect his gig to last forever. In 2016, “I was doing groups of 40 or 50 people to 100 people. It’s gotten a lot less,” he tells me in a low, hoarse rumble. “I’m expecting maybe two years more of this. The engine is going to fade.” Game of Thrones will drift away like the other narratives, maybe faster than slower.

Hansson’s other sideline, making use of his academic background, is being a Viking reenactor. He’s in a group of 200 people, not just born-and-bred Icelanders, who train in sword-fighting, archery, and crafts. They camp out for a week at a time, wearing period-correct clothing and sleeping in Viking tents based on archaeological discoveries. They fight, cook food over open fires, and get very drunk.

This is what refreshes him, participating in the illusion of another life, which is the same thing that we’re always seeking when we travel: to get outside of ourselves and imagine new possibilities, however unlikely or unreal they are. Iceland remains ideal for this purpose. “It’s what fantasies are made of,” Hansson says. “This untamed wild, this alien landscape, this vastness.”

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Secret to Iceland’s tourism boom? A financial crash and a volcanic eruption

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REYKJAVIK — Iceland has discovered the secret to a booming tourist industry: First have a mammoth financial implosion, then an enormous volcanic explosion.

The Hotel Ranga, a luxury resort just 19 miles from the slopes of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. Photo: The New York Times

The collapse of the Icelandic krona after the 2008 financial crisis transformed this Arctic island packed with 35 active volcanoes into a top destination by making it cheap for visitors.

Two years later, Eyjafjallajokull erupted, spewing thick ash clouds into European skies. Millions of passengers were grounded for days and airlines suffered financial losses. But the explosion put Iceland on the map. The foreign news media descended on the island, beaming images around the world of spectacular landscapes, even as journalists struggled to pronounce the volcano’s name.

“Iceland has been saved by the crash and the eruption,” said Mr Fridrik Palsson, who owns Hotel Ranga, a luxury resort just 19 miles (30.5 km) from the slopes of Eyjafjallajokull, the 16-letter volcano that is often shortened to E-16 by foreigners. “I have never seen anything take off so fast,” he said.

The combined effect of the catastrophes has been an invasion on a scale possibly unseen since Vikings raided the island hundreds of years ago. Tourists are expected to outnumber the local population of 330,000 by seven to one next year, according to official data. By comparison, last year visitors to France outnumbered the French by two to one.

Tourism is now the island’s biggest industry, taking over from fishing and aluminum smelting, much as the financial sector did in the years before the crash.

The influx could be even higher following the rise of the Pirate Party.

With its black pirate flag and anarchist leanings, it recently gained more seats in parliament and even more attention, helping to burnish Iceland’s image as cool and alternative.

The number of tourists has risen by as much as 30 per cent every year for the last four years, according to Iceland’s Tourist Board. They brought in revenues of US$3.2 billion (S$4.5 billion) in 2015, a third of the country’s export earnings. Tourism is the single biggest employer, and many Icelanders are pouring money into services and new construction.

Mr Palsson, who used to sell Iceland as a place to see the northern lights, employs an astronomer in his hotel. He has also invested in three expensive telescopes that are powerful enough for guests to see the rings on Saturn or the fuzzy glow of a distant dying star.

Landsbref, a fund management company that was spun off from one of three failed Icelandic banks, set up a US$37 million tourism fund.

Reykjavik looks like a Scandinavian version of Singapore: compact, clean, orderly and rich. Streets are lined with Crayola-color houses and Mercedes cars. Chic coffeehouses sell kale-and-date sandwiches, and play Ethiopian jazz. Restaurants offer inventive Nordic cuisine using local ingredients like puffin and shark. (One chef also proudly announced that Iceland now grows cucumbers, albeit in a greenhouse.)

The 101, a boutique hotel that was once an exclusive hangout for bankers (101 is also the city’s richest postal code), is now filled with tourists. In a possible dig at the hotel’s former denizens, a sculpture of what looked like a gray-suited banker hung on one wall, with a cryptic instruction, “Disconnect the battery, remove the rear hood and hinge brackets,” inscribed beneath it.

Tourists come from as far as Hong Kong. They chase the northern lights. They scale glaciers. They dive in the Arctic Circle with puffins, go horseback riding or take helicopter tours listening to ethereal, whale-like sounds by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Fans of Game of Thrones flock to filming locations around the island, some, apparently, genuinely in search of Wildlings.

Outside the capital, thick white plumes of steam, which are harnessed for Iceland’s energy needs, rise in the sky, as if the earth were vaping. Hot springs are everywhere, even in people’s backyards.

But there is growing concern that uncontrolled tourism is placing too large a burden on this small island. Housing prices and rents are rising quickly, forcing young people to live with their parents. Car rentals have tripled, clogging traffic. Littering and light pollution are spoiling parts of the landscape, many Icelanders say.

“It’s like the city is not my city anymore,” Ms Birgitta Jonsdottir, the leader of the Pirate Party, complained last month.

“It’s like Disneyland downtown.”

A poll in October conducted by the national broadcaster RUV reported that 87 per cent of Icelanders want the government to raise fees or taxes on tourists.

The tourist boom is making some Icelanders uneasy. Another crash like the one that hit the banks is just a matter of time, and many said they are saving money or investing in hard assets.

Pessimists say all it takes to prick the tourism bubble is a sudden drop in visitors, triggered by something like a financial crisis overseas or the adverse effects of Britain’s exit from the European Union.

“It’s happening all over again,” said Mr Kristjan Asjaersson, 51, a cabdriver. During Iceland’s short-lived heyday, he recalled having to criss-cross the island just to deliver fish caught by Icelandic billionaires — they had forgotten to pack their catch before flying off in their private jets.

“Too many people rely on tourism,” he said. “When tourist numbers fall, the economy will collapse again. I know it will happen. But I will be prepared.”

Mr Diddi Bardarson, a tall man with russet locks that reveal his Viking roots, also predicted another crash. Instead of relying so heavily on tourism, he is putting his financial security into a living asset: Iceland’s famous horses.

Mr Bardarson breeds hundreds of Icelandic horses on a 900-acre (364 ha) ranch in Hella, a small town 55 miles southeast of Reykjavik that straddles the salmon-rich Ranga River. Iceland exports nearly 4,000 horses a year, many of them to the United States and Canada. A fine stallion can fetch more than US$2 million.

“Horses are deep in our soul,” Mr Bardarson said, feeding a 21-year-old black stallion named Markus, eyes hidden under luxuriously thick bangs, who has sired more than 150 horses. “Horses were, and still are, our lifeline.”

Mr Bardarson has also benefited from the tourism boom. Demand for his horses has grown sevenfold over the past few years, he said, partly because some rich tourists become so enamoured of the animals that they just have to have one or two.

Icelandic horses are purebred; because of contamination fears, once a horse leaves the island it is prohibited from returning. Unlike other breeds, Icelandic horses have five gaits and can travel up to 74 miles a day on rough terrain, breeders say.

Most important, Mr Bardarson said, the hardy animals are reliable currency during times of financial instability. When the krona’s value evaporated during the crash, they came to his rescue — he bartered horses for cars and tractors.

Mr Bardarson said he and his horses were preparing for leaner times. “Horses start slowing down their heartbeat. They try to get fatter and grow a thicker coat for the coming hard winter,” he said. “So should humans.” NEW YORK TIMES

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Previous Article
1 0000000404811396 https://isni.org/isni/0000000404811396 International Monetary Fund

Contributor Notes

In this paper, we review developments in Japanese inbound tourism and investigate the main determinants of its rapid growth prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model with data on 34 tourism source markets from 1996Q1 to 2018Q4, we find that not only tourist income and tourism-related relative prices, also visa policies have had significant impacts on Japan’s inbound tourism demand in the long run. In the short run, natural disasters have had large and prolonged effects on tourism. We then derive policy implications for the post-COVID-19 revival of Japanese inbound tourism.

I. Introduction

Before the early-2020 COVID-19 bust in tourist arrival numbers set in, Japan’s tourism industry had witnessed a boom in the number of international tourists over the previous decade ( International Monetary Fund 2020a , 2020b ). The number of arrivals almost tripled from 2013 to 2018 to a record 31 million. The average growth rate of tourist arrivals during the 2013–2018 period was 25.1 percent annually. The share of international tourists in Japan’s total domestic tourism expenditure increased from 4.7 percent in 2009 to 17.3 percent in 2018, marking their increasing importance for the tourism industry in Japan. However, the number of international visitors has collapsed since the beginning of 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with essentially no tourists arriving in April and May, 2020 (see Box, Section II ).

Although COVID-19 is having a significant adverse impact on the tourism industry, not only in Japan but also in a global context, discussions on how to re-open borders and revitalize the tourism industry have also emerged recently. In light of that, this paper aims to facilitate these discussions by shedding light on potential drivers of the arrival of international tourists to Japan, especially during the tourist boom, and drawing important policy lessons for the tourism revival phase.

This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, our data coverage is comprehensive and universal. The dataset covers 34 origin countries, representing 99 percent of total international arrivals to Japan in 2018, and ranges from 1996Q1 to 2018 Q4. Second, the paper examines a broad range of possible factors contributing to Japan’s inbound tourism demand. Specifically, the paper focuses on f ive potential f actors: (1) income level in tourist origin countries; (2) the bilateral relative price between Japan and the source markets; (3) the substitute prices in Japan’s tourism competitors; (4) visa policies; and (5) natural disasters. In particular, we propose a new calculation method for tourism weights to overcome the drawback of existing calculation methods f or the price competitiveness of Japan with its tourism competitors in attracting tourists from a specific source market. 2 Besides the mentioned determinants, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) disease in 2003 and the Global Financial Crisis are also taken into consideration. Third, employing the econometric technique of a panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, we investigate the possible long-run relationship between Japan’s inbound tourism demand and its determinants. The panel ARDL is robust for large T , large N data samples, while a panel fixed effect model (as used in previous studies) is subject to possible estimation bias. In particular, the panel ARDL model allows us to confirm whether a long-run relationship exists and to detect potential heterogeneities in long-run parameters among origin markets by comparing different types of estimators.

We find that there exists a long-run relationship between Japan’s inbound tourism demand and its determinants. Moreover, we also find that heterogeneities in long-run coefficients exist at the aggregate level, implying that tourists from different source markets can rea ct differently to changes in determinants in the long run. Combining source markets into country groups based on geography and the level of economic development, we confirm that tourists from countries with similar backgrounds are likely to respond homogenously.

In the long run, the GDP of origin countries and the bilateral real exchange rates between Japan and the source markets are among the important factors contributing to the rapid development of Japan’s inbound tourism over time. Among country groups, tourism demand from non-Asian countries has the highest income elasticity, while advanced Asia has the highest price elasticity. The substitute prices in alternative destinations seem to influence travel decisions of tourists from emerging Asia, but this result is less robust. The introduction of multiple visas and/or visa exemptions f or emerging and developing countries in Asia are found to have boosted Japan ‘s inbound tourism demand significantly.

In the short run, natural disasters are found to have significant effects on demand from all source markets over several quarters, with tourist numbers from non-Asian countries still 4.2 percent lower even nine months after the disaster. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 also had a large impact on tourist numbers from all countries. In particular, the number of Chinese tourists dropped 50 percent during the SARS period. Furthermore, a strong pattern of seasonality is another characteristic of inbound tourism demand in Japan.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II briefly discusses th e development of inbound tourism in Japan over recent decades and in the recent COVID-19 tourism bust period. A review of previous studies on tourism determinants in general and on Japan inbound tourism in particular is provided in Section III . Section IV describes the methodology and data, and expected signs for coefficients. Results and findings are presented in Section V . Finally, Section VI concludes with a discussion on lessons from the boom period for the revival of Japan’s inbound tourism following the COVID-19 bust in tourist arrivals.

II. Inbound Tourism Developments in Japan

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of international visitors to Japan had surged during the preceding decade ( Figure 1 ). The boom is mostly attributed to the sharp increase in the number of inbound tourists, as the number of foreigners coming to Japan for business and other purposes has evolved much less. Especially from 2013, the number of arrivals witnessed strong growth. This was also the year when the new government of Prime Minister Abe essentially started to reinvigorate tourism-oriented policies to promote the tourism industry. The total number of visitor arrivals has tripled from 2013 to 2018 to reach a record 31 million, with an average annual growth rate of 25.1 percent during this period. The government’s target is 60 million tourist arrivals in 2030.

Japan: Total International Arrivals

Citation: IMF Working Papers 2020, 169; 10.5089/9781513553207.001.A001

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The number of tourist arrivals has increased from all markets, in particular from Asia ( Figure 1 ). Asia has always been the largest source market for Japanese inbound tourism, and its importance for Japan’s tourism industry has been increasing dramatically. While the number of tourists from North America, Europe and Australia was more than twice as large in 2018 than in 2012, the number of Asian visitors has increased three- to six-fold within the same period. Asia now provides 84.5 percent of total visitors to Japan compared to 75 percent in 2012. Of the top-five most important origin markets of Japan in 2018, four were in Asia: the People’s Republic of China (26.9 percent of total inbound visitors), South Korea (24.2 percent), Taiwan Province of China (15.3 percent), and Hong Kong SAR (7.1 percent). The fifth most important market was the United States (4.9 percent).

The inbound tourist boom is highly concentrated in certain regions (“tourist hotspots”) within Japan. While foreign tourists have also increasingly been venturing into outlying areas, they remain highly focused on the Kanto region in and around Tokyo, the Osaka/Kyoto area (the Kinki region), Hokkaido, and Okinawa ( Figure 2 ). 3 Diversification of origin countries differs too: almost half of all foreign visitors in the Kyushu region are South Korean; and in Kanto and Kinki, 30 percent of visitors are from the People’s Republic of China. As per-capita spending is also higher in the tourist hotspots, Kanto and Kinki receive more than 70 percent of total foreign tourist expenditures, while other regions such as Tohoku or Shikoku la g substantially behind these hotspots.

Japan: Development of Inbound Tourism at the Regional Level

Altogether, inbound tourism has become the main growth engine of Japan’s tourism industry. In 2018, Japan’s total tourism expenditure was ¥ 26.1 trillion. 4 Although the expenditure of Japanese residents on domestic travel contributes the larger part to the tourism economy, this contribution has been stagnating ( Figure 3 ). In contrast, the contribution of international visitors to total tourism consumption has significantly increased from 4.7 percent in 2009 to 17.3 percent in 2018 to reach ¥ 4.5 trillion.

Japan: Contribution of Inbound Tourism to the Japanese Economy

Inbound tourism also contributes to Japan’s current account surplus ( Figure 3 ). After turning positive for the first time in 2015, Japan’s travel services surplus reached almost 0.5 percent of GDP in 2018. This reflects a step upward trend of travel credits since 2011, and the erosion of travel debits. The latter has been dominated by a f all in the per-capita overseas spending of Japanese tourists rather than a decline in their annual headcount, which has fluctuated around 17 million persons. 5 The structural change in the services balance has been significant. Compared to ten years ago, the travel balance has been transformed from the largest deficit factor into the second-largest surplus factor of the services account, after income from intellectual property ( Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, 2019 ).

The Japanese Government has been strongly supporting its tourism industry in attracting international visitors ( Figure 4 ). Since the government of Prime Minister Abe established the Ministerial Council on the Promotion of Japan as a Tourism-Oriented Country in March 2013, a broad range of measures have been launched by the government to strengthen Japan’s attractiveness f or tourists. The measures were th e n further reinvigorated in 2016 with the initiation of the 2016 Tourism Strategy and the establishment of the Tourism Strategy Promotion Council. In 2017, the budget for tourism promotion and investment on tourism infrastructure had increased four-fold compared to 2012. I n January 2019, the government introduced an international departure tax to secure additional financial resources for promoting tourism. Extensive relaxation of visa requirements for international tourists has also been undertaken, benefiting over 40 countries during 2013–20 18 either with the introduction of multiple visas or visa exemptions. All those measures helped boost the total number of international visitors to Japan.

Japan: Government Efforts to Boost Tourist Numbers

The COVID-19 Shock and Japan’s Inbound Tourism

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19 ) in early-20 20 has been weighing significantly on global tourism.

The total tourist arrivals to Japan plunged by 58.3 percent (y-o-y) in February and 93 percent (y-o-y) in March, and collapsed to essentially zero thereafter. The sharp fall was led by a decrease in Chinese tourist numbers on the back of the outbreak of COVID-1 9 in China and subsequent travel restrictions, starting with a ban on group travel imposed by the Chinese government from January 27 th , 2020. Subsequently, the further spread of the pandemic, lockdowns and travel policies in origin countries, the reduction of transport links, and finally COVID-19 -induced entry restrictions by Japan, which were gradually extended to more and more countries, entailed the ultimate collapse in tourist arrivals. 1

Japan: Growth in the tourist numbers

(monthly growth, y.o.y, percent)

In the model presented in Section IV , we estimate the impact of the 2003 SARS—another type of the coronavirus—on tourist arrivals. The SARS outbreak had a broad-based impact on tourist arrivals from all source markets, with the largest effect in the case of SARS-hit China, where the number of visitors to Japan dropped by half (see Section V , part C). The SARS experience has only limited applicability to gauge the final impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic, but even the estimated results from the SARS period have already suggested a significant and large negative impact of the new coronavirus on Japan tourism. This has subsequently been confirmed by aforementioned actual developments.

III. Literature Review

A. Tourism Demand and its Determinants

The demand for tourism-related services of a country incorporates demand from domestic residents and foreign residents (“inbound demand”), with studies of the latter being dominant in the literature due to better statistical coverage ( Song et al., 2019 ). Among indicators measuring inbound tourism demand, the number of visitor arrivals is most frequently used as a dependent variable, followed by tourist expenditure ( Lim, 1997 ; Li et al., 2005 ). Inbound tourism demand is typically found to be a function of the income level in the origin countries, price levels and exchange rates, the accessibility of transportation, and tourism-promoting policies and marketing. A lagged dependent variable is also of ten used to capture habit persistence and “word-of-mouth effects”. 6

Among the demand-determining factors, tourist income and relative prices are the dominant factors examined in previous studies:

Tourist income is usually proxied by one of the following source market indicators: real GDP ( Kumar et al., 2020 ; Dogru et al., 2017 ); PPP-adjusted real GDP ( Culiuc, 2014 ); PPP-adjusted real GDP per capita ( Konishi, 2019 ; Laframboise et al., 2014 ); PPP-adjusted real GNP per capita ( Eilat and Einav, 2004 ); unemployment rate ( Laframboise et al., 2014 ), or industrial production index ( Dogru et al., 2017 ). In this context, data frequency plays a role in selecting proxy variables for income, as some indicators are only available annually.

Bilateral real exchange rates are frequently used as a proxy for relative prices, although some studies try to include the relative consumer price index as a variable that is separate from the bilateral nominal exchange rate ( Kim and Lee, 2017 ; Dogru et al., 2017 ). However, there are two reasons favoring the use of real exchange rates: first, from an economic point of view, travelers compare the destination’s cost of living in their domestic currency when deciding to travel ( Song and Li, 2008 ); and second, f r o m an econometric point of view, including exchange rates and prices separately might yield a biased outcome ( Kumar et al., 2020 ; Kim and Lee, 2017 ; Dogru et al., 2017 ). Tourism prices would be ideal proxies for the relative price, but studies utilizing this data are limited due to the scarcity of indices of tourism prices. 7 Instead, consumer price indices (CPI) are often used when calculating the bilateral real exchange rates. Other proxies for prices used in previous studies include transportation cost, usually proxied by oil prices and/or jet-fuel prices, although the influence of those prices is usually found to be statistically insignificant ( Kim and Song, 1998 ; Kim and Lee, 2017 ).

Economic theory would also suggest that third-country price effects could be important for the development of inbound tourism demand in a specific country. If trips to alternative destinations become cheaper, foreign tourists might choose to go to those alternative destinations instead ( Seetaram, 2012 ). Previous studies usually chose countries with similar geography, climate and culture as substitute destinations. Substitute prices in those destinations are then measured as either unweighted average exchange rate-adjusted prices ( Lim and McAleer, 2001 ; Dogru et al., 2017 ) or tourism-weighted average exchange rate-adjusted prices ( Song et al., 2003 ; Kumar et al., 2020 ). The latter method is preferable as it allows the weights to change throughout the estimation period to capture changes in travel tastes and trends. Substitution effects are found to be less relevant if third countries serve as “p a ck age destinations”, that is when travelers visit several countries on one trip ( Li et al., 2011 ).

Non-economic factors h ave also been included in previous studies to capture external shocks to tourism demand. Those may include seasonality, political instability, disasters, diseases, safety at the destination, marketing effectiveness and tourism-oriented policies. Kumar et al. (2020) provides a comprehensive literature review of these factors.

B. Japan’s Inbound Tourism and its Determinants

Despite the rapid development of Japan’s inbound tourism, empirical studies on its determinants are limited. 8 At a bilateral level, previous studies mostly addressed the tourism flow from Korea to Japan. Using the data of tourist numbers from South Korea to Japan, Kim and Lee (2017) compare models with several different tourism price variables and identify the model using relative prices and the exchange rate (and without transportation costs) as the best one. Lee et al. (2010) also investigate the effect of Japan’s visa-free entry granted for South Korean tourists. They found that Korean tourist numbers to Japan increased by 12.1 percent in the first year and 25 percent in the second year due to the visa exemption. In addition, Kim et al. (2018) investigate the role of Abenomics in boosting Japan’s inbound tourism from South Korea. Utilizing interaction terms of a dummy variable for Abenomics with the bilateral exchange rate and Japan’s GDP, the paper find s that the impact of the exchange rate and economic growth on Japan’s inbound tourism from South Korea is significantly larger than in the pre-Abenomics period.

At a multilateral level, Nakazawa (2009) was among the first to use data on inbound tourist numbers for Japan, from 32 source markets for the period 1996Q1 to 2008Q4, to investigate the determinants of Japan’s inbound tourism in three models: panel fixed and random effect models and a gravity model. For recent tourism developments, Konishi (2019) estimates the impact of origin countries’ GDP per capita, bilateral exchange rates and visa policies on tourist arrivals using a panel fixed effect model with 20 countries for 2003–2016. All three factors are confirmed to have a significant impact on tourism demand. Mizuho research institute (2016) examined the determinants of tourist arrivals to Japan from 15 countries by conducting quarterly time-series OLS regressions for each country for 1995Q1 -2015Q4. Besides the three factors examined by Konishi (2019) , Mizuho’s research takes into account the oil price and event dummies for each country, such as a SARS dummy, a dummy for political tensions between Japan and China that occurred in 2012, and a 2011 Japan earthquake dummy. They confirmed that those events played a role in determining the number of tourist arrivals. Utilizing annual time-series data, Asemota and Bala (2012) find that there is a cointegrated relationship between standard determinants and tourist arrivals to Japan from five major Western countries over the period 1962–2009.

IV. Data and Methodology

In this paper, we use the panel ARDL modeling approach proposed by Pesaran et al. (1999) to investigate the possible long-run relationship between Japan’s inbound tourism demand and its determinants. As derived from the panel error correction model (ECM), the panel ARDL model has the following main advantages: first, it is superior in the presence of a mixed order of integration in the data; second, it is robust to omitted variables bias and simultaneous determination of growth regressors; and third, it is more appropriate when dealing with large N , large T dynamic panels. 9 Blackburne and Frank (2007) argue that different from traditional large N , small T panels, the assumption of homogeneity of slope parameters is often violated in large N , large T panels. The panel ARDL model instead allows the slope parameters to differ among N units, using two types of estimators. The first estimator is the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator, for which long-run slope parameters are assumed homogenous across units but short-run parameters can differ. Therefore, the long-run coefficients are the same f or all countries in the panel, while the short-run coefficients differ for each country and can be reported either by country or as an average. The second estimator is the Mean Group (MG) estimator which simply estimates N time-series regressions and averages the coefficients. The most appropriate of these two estimators can be selected by a Hausman test.

We start with a panel ECM for Japan inbound tourism demand as f ollows:

where ln denotes the natural logarithm. T i,t is the number of tourists arriving from country i in time t . Y i,t is the real GDP of country i in time t . E i,t is the bilateral real exchange rate of Japan with country i in time t , measured by yen per unit of country i ’s currency. SP i,t is the substitute prices of destinations alternative to Japan for tourists from country i in time t. Visamul i,t is a multiple visa dummy which takes the value of 1 if tourists from country i in time t are allowed to apply for a multiple-entry visa and 0 otherwise. If visa requirements are further relaxed so that tourists are not required to have a visa to come to Japan, the additional visa dummy visareq will take the value 0, and 1 otherwise. D t refers to a set of dummy variables: a disaster dummy, a dummy for the Global Financial Crisis, a SARS dummy, and seasonal dummies. 10 μ i is the country-specific effect, ε i,t is an error term. ϑ ^ i , t − 1 is the estimated residual obtained from the following long run cointegration relationship:

The estimated parameter ρ i is the error correction term (ECT), indicating the adjustment speed to the long-run equilibrium. If there is a long-run relationship among variables, ρ i is expected to be significant and negative. A higher ρ i in absolute value points to faster adjustment of the short-run level back to the long-run equilibrium level.

The panel ECM model can be easily re-written into the form of an ARDL model:

In equation (3), the ECT parameter corresponding to ρ i in equation (1) is the coefficient ρ 0i . The long-run income elasticity is calculated as β 1 i = − ρ 1 i ρ 0 i , relative price elasticity as β 2 i = − ρ 2 i ρ 0 i , and substitute price elasticity as β 3 i = − ρ 3 i ρ 0 i . Meanwhile, the impacts of a change in visa policy from single to multiple visa and from a visa requirement to no visa requirement are captured by β 4 i = − ρ 4 i ρ 0 i a n d β 5 i = − ρ 5 i ρ 0 i , respectively. As β 4i and β 5i are coefficients of a logarithm variable regressed on dummies, additional calculations were done for scale interpretation. 11

The estimation of equation (3) also gives us an idea about short-run impacts of changes in the independent variables, especially the effect of natural disasters, the Global Financial Crisis, and the SARS outbreak. In addition, equation (3) captures the seasonality of tourist arrivals.

B. Data/Expected Signs

The data of tourism arrivals used in this paper includes inbound flows from 34 source markets to Japan in the period from 1996Q1 to 2018Q4. 12 This covers almost the total population of tourists coming to Japan, as 99.0 percent of total international arrivals to Japan in 2018 were from these 34 source markets. Countries are grouped in line with the geography and level of economic development. 13

The income level of tourists is proxied by the quarterly real GDP of their origin country measured in that country’s currency. An increase in their income is expected to lead to an increase in the number of visitors to Japan.

The development of the relative price level of Japan compared to a tourist source market i is measured by the bilateral real exchange rate of the Japanese yen vis-à-vis i ’s local currency (E i ) as in the following equation:

where S i and S j are the bilateral nominal exchange rates of i ’s local currency and the yen visà-vis the U.S dollar, respectively. CPI i and CPI J are the consumer price indices (2010=100) of country i and Japan, respectively. An increase in E i implies a real depreciation of the yen against the local currency, making travelling to Japan more affordable for tourists from i . Therefore, the expected sign for the coefficient on E i,t is positive.

To measure the price competitiveness of a destination that is competing with Japan, we follow the calculation used in Song et al. (2003) and Kumar et al. (2020) and calculate tourism-weighted substitute prices. Following Song et al. (2003) , we choose six countries or territories as alternative/competitor tourism destinations to Japan: Korea, Taiwan Province of China, Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, Thailand and the People’s Republic of China. 14 The substitute prices are calculated as below:

where CPI c is the consumer price index (2010=100) in country c , an alternative destination to Japan. S c is the nominal exchange rate of c ’s local currency vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar. The weights are calculated as w i , c = O T i , c / Σ c = 1 6 O T i , c , where OT i,c is the number of outbound tourists from the source market i to the substitute destination c . In contrast to previous studies, we allow the weight w i,c of the substitute destination c to vary by source markets. 15 The source-market-specific weights, which also vary by year, allow us to capture precisely the travel tastes and trends of tourists from a specific source market over time. A decrease in SP i,t , either because of a decrease in the overall price level at the substitute destination c or a depreciation of the local currency of c , implies that the trip to c becomes less expensive. If the substitution effect is larger than the income effect, this would lead to a decrease in inbound tourism to Japan, and, therefore, the expected sign of the coefficient of SP i would be positive. However, if the income effect dominates, both the competitor destinations and Japan could benefit from more inbound tourism from country i and the coefficient of SP i would be negative. In a similar vein, a negative sign could also result if (all or some of) the competitor countries are packaged together with Japan as a destination and visited together during one trip.

The disaster dummy takes into account the specified disasters that happened during the 1996–2018 period. It takes the value 1 for the quarter in which a disaster happened, and 0 otherwise. 16 The Global Financial Crisis dummy takes the value 1 during the 2008–2009 period. Finally, the SARS dummy takes the value of 1 during Q1 and Q2 in 2003 when SARS peaked, and 0 otherwise.

We use Im, Pesaran and Shin (IPS) unit root tests to check the stationarity of variables. All data are confirmed to be stationary in first difference ( Appendix Table 3 ). The lag order of the ARDL regressions were selected using the Bayesian Information Criterion with the maximum lag length set to 4.

A. Heterogeneity in Long-run Behavior of Japan Tourists from Different Countries

Table 1 shows the PMG’s long-run coefficients obtained from equation (3), estimated during the period 1996–20 18 for all 34 source markets together as well as for different sub-groups of source markets. Column (1) shows the PMG’s long-run coefficients of the estimation f or all 34 markets. The Hausman test rejects the null hypothesis that the PMG is more preferred than the MG, suggesting heterogeneity across countries in the way their tourists react to changes in the independent variables in the long run. This points to the necessity of further analysis at source market sub-group level.

Japan: Long-run Results of ARDL Panels for Tourist Arrivals (1996–20 18 )

We therefore initially divided the source markets into four groups in line with geography and income levels: advanced Asia, emerging Asia, advanced non-Asia and emerging non-Asia. 17 However, a series of Hausman tests suggested the following final grouping: advanced Asia, emerging Asia (excluding the People’s Republic of China), the People’s Republic of China, and non-Asia.

To elaborate on the detailed derivation of this final grouping, as shown in column (2) of Table 1 , the Hausman test accepts the null hypothesis of a preference f or the PMG estimator over the MG estimator in the case of advanced Asia. However, for the group of seven emerging Asia n countries, the test could not be performed. We suspected China may be an outlier in this group, and therefore performed the test again for the same group but without China. 18 For this smaller group with six countries, the Hausman test accepted the homogeneity in long-run parameters (column (4)). Finally, the groups of emerging non-Asia and advanced non-Asia are merged due to the limited number of emerging non-Asian countries in the dataset. Countries in the non-Asia group are also confirmed by the Hausman test to have homogeneous long-run parameters (column (5)).

B. Long-run Tourism Determinants

As shown in Table 1 , we confirm a long-run homogenous relationship at country sub-group levels between total tourist arrivals in Japan and their determinants during the 1996–2018 period. 19 , 20 The ECTs are all significant and range from 0.07 to 0.67, indicating that 7 to 67 percent of the deviation of the short-run from the long-run level are adjusted in the next quarter.

In the long run, tourist income as well as relative price movements have a significant impact on the total number of tourist arrivals from all country groups to Japan. Income elasticities range from 2.4 to 5.3, indicating that a one percent increase in real GDP of the tourist origin country can raise the number of Japan tourist arrivals from there by 2.4 to 5.3 percent in the long term. In addition, a one percent yen depreciation in real terms vis-à-vis the origin country currency leads to a 0.7 to 2.5 percent increase in the number of tourists, with tourist numbers from advanced Asian countries responding the most to the real exchange rate movement. As tourist arrivals from these countries account for around half of all arrivals to Japan (50.8 percent in 2018), this result suggests a high sensitivity of Japan’s inbound tourism to exchange rate changes.

The availability and competitiveness of alternative destinations seem to influence the demand for Japan tourism in China and other emerging Asian countries. In these groups, the substitute price elasticity is negative, indicating the dominance of income effects over substitution effects, including the possibility of alternative destinations serving as ‘package destinations’ together with Japan. 21 For instance, income effects might discourage tourists from coming to Japan if alternative destinations that the same tourists also want to visit in a given time period become more expensive and hence constrain their budget for Japan tourism as well.

The success of the government’s visa relaxation policy in boosting the number of tourists to Japan is strongly confirmed by our empirical results. The coefficients of the multiple-visa dummy are 1.17 and 0.63 for China and the group of other emerging Asia, respectively, indicating that the introduction of multiple visas increases the number of tourists from China and other emerging Asian countries respectively by 224 percent and 87 percent in the long run (derived from the estimated coefficients of the dummy variable of 1.18 and 0.63, respectively). 22 Furthermore, removing visa requirements fully would lift the total number of tourists from emerging Asia by 307 percent (from a coefficient of 1.40) in the long run. Japan’s relaxation of visa requirements for over 40 countries in 2013 to 2018 has therefore likely contributed a great deal to Japan’s inbound tourism boom during that period.

C. Short-run Tourism Determinants

Table 2 shows averaged parameters of short-run determinants of tourism arrivals for each group of source markets in the 1996–2018 period. 23 In addition to the long-run determinants, a disaster dummy, a Global Financial Crisis (GFC) dummy, a SARS dummy and quarterly dummies are included to capture the possible short-term impacts of those factors on Japan’s tourism demand by foreigners.

Determinants of Japan’s Tourist Arrivals in the Short run (1996–2018)

The results confirm the vulnerability of Japan’s inbound tourism demand to natural disasters. The disaster dummy shows simultaneous negative impacts on tourism demand from most source markets—tourist numbers could decrease by 11 to 17 percent in the period in which a disaster happens. The impact becomes even larger in the following period, reaching afall of as large as a 46 percent in tourist numbers from emerging Asia. For non-Asian tourists, even the second quarterly lag is significant, with tourist numbers still 4.2 percent lower two quarters after the disaster happened.

The SARS outbreak had a broad-based impact on tourist arrivals from all source markets. During the first and second quarter of 2003, an estimated 16–20 percent of tourists canceled their trips to Japan due to the SARS outbreak. The figure was extremely high in the case of virus-hit China, with the number of visitors to Japan dropping by half.

Finally, Japan’s inbound tourism also exhibits large seasonality patterns, which differ among source markets. Q1 is chosen as the reference point in this paper. The pattern is that compared to Q1, Q2 and Q4 are favored by tourists from emerging Asia (excluding China); Q3 witnesses the highest tourist numbers from China a n d advanced Asia; and non-Asian tourists prefer to visit Japan in Q2, Q3, and Q4 more than they do in Q1. While seasonality in aggregate tourist numbers is somewhat mitigated by the varying seasonality across country groups, it can still pose challenges on the supply side, that is in terms of securing sufficient labor and other inputs in tourism-related industries during seasonal peaks.

VI. Conclusions and Policies

Our analysis has crystalized important lessons from Japan’s pre-COVID-19 tourism boom for the tourism revival phase that will follow the COVID-19 crisis. The most important conclusions are as follows.

The rapid development of Japan’s inbound tourism before COVID-19 was to a large extent the outcome of the government’s substantial efforts to attract tourists through extensive relaxation of visa requirements, supported by other favorable developments such as yen depreciation and income convergence overseas. In the tourism revival phase following COVID-19, the further relaxation of visa requirements could be considered as a powerful tool to not only attract more tourists in aggregate but also to diversify tourism source markets. Targeting a broader set of Asian emerging markets would help reduce risks from idiosyncratic shocks in dominant tourism source markets.

In addition, the empirical results point to a high sensitivity of Japan’s tourism industry to price factors, that is relative prices and exchange rates, including any sudden yen appreciation due to the yen’s safe-haven status ( Han and Westelius, 2019 ). This could pose risks to the revival of inbound tourism.

To reduce the price and exchange rate sensitivity of inbound tourism, greater orientation toward tourism experiences, especially toward Japan-specific unique experiences, a n d associated product differentiation (“Japan branding”), could help. Bringing more tourists into non-urban regions could be one important way to foster the transition to experience-oriented tourism and away from a shopping-oriented tourism, which is currently particularly pertinent among Asian tourists. 24 The “regionalization” of tourism could then in turn incentivize longer stays, repeat visits, and more per-capita spending by tourists. Preparing for more regional tourism would also be in line with likely post-COVID-19 demand shifts as regional (non-urban) tourism may well become more attractive to tourists than urban areas in the presence of COVID-19 and other health concerns, which puts a premium on closeness to nature and low population density ( OECD, 2020 ). Against this backdrop, revamping regional tourism through experience-oriented tourism can also be a good policy in the post-COVID-19 period, as it also fosters tourism at the high end of per-capita spending.

Our research also confirms that natural disasters can have a large and prolonged impact on inbound tourism in the short term. As international tourists react adversely to disaster and post-disaster situations, countermeasures for mitigating the impact of natural disasters on tourism are necessary in not only disaster-affected areas but also unaffected areas. Implementation of a disaster information policy, including the efficient and accurate provision of information about the geographic reach and duration of disaster effects, will help prevent tourists from staying away and assist them in rescheduling their visits. Similar lessons would apply in the case of contagious diseases, such as COVID-19, with respect to information on health-related matters, including on the high standards of medical care and health provision in Japan. Nurturing active cooperation and partnerships with the health-ca r e sector to foster its preparedness to cater for the needs of tourists would also be beneficial, not only in the case of contagious diseases. Above all, measures to restore travelers’ confidence will play a major role in attracting tourists after any crisis.

Finally, a revival in inbound tourism needs to be synchronized with the supply of tourism-related services, including labor inputs and tourism infrastructure. While fostering labor-saving efficiency gains, more foreign labor (as well as greater female and elderly labor market participation) will need to be considered as Japan’s labor force continues to shrink. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, investment in appropriate technology can be effective both to reduce labor needs and costs, a n d foster social distancing and other contagion-prevention measures. In addition, continuing to enhance tourism inf rastructure—such as free Wi-fi, multilingual signage and cashless payment systems—are among the top priorities to ease tourists’ concerns about travelling to Japan. 25

Asemota , O. , J. Bala , and D. Abdullahi , 2012 , “ Modeling Tourism Demand in Japan Using Cointegration and Error Correction Model ,” International Review of Business Research Papers , Vol. 8 ( 2 ), pp. 29 – 43 .

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Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) , 2020 , Tourism Policy Responses to the Coronavirus (COVID-1 9) , https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/tourism-policy-responses-to-the-coronavirus-COVID-19-6466aa20/ .

Pesaran , M. H. , Y. Shin , and R.P. Smith , 1999 , “ Pooled Mean Group Estimation of Dynamic Heterogeneous Panels ,” Journal of the American Statistical Association , Vol. 94 ( 446 ), pp. 621 – 34 .

Seetaram , N. , 2012 , “ Immigration and International Inbound Tourism: Empirical Evidence from Australia ,” Tourism Management , Vol. 33 ( 6 ), pp. 1535 – 43 .

Song , H. and G. Li , 2008 , “ Tourism Demand Modelling and Forecasting – A Review of Recent Research ,” Tourism Management , Vol. 29 ( 2 ), pp. 203 – 20 .

Song , H. , R.T.R. Qiu , and J. Park , 2019 , “ A Review of Research on Tourism Demand Forecasting: Launching the Annals of Tourism Research Curated Collection on Tourism Demand Forecasting , Annals of Tourism Research , Vol. 75 , pp. 338 – 62 .

Song , H. , K.K.F. Wong and K.K.S. Chon , 2003 , “ Modelling and Forecasting the Demand for Hong Kong Tourism ,” International Journal of Hospitality Management , Vol. 22 ( 4 ) pp. 435 – 51 .

World Economic Forum (WEF) , 2017 , The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2017 , https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-travel-tourism-competitiveness-report-2017 , Geneva .

Country Group Information

List of Data and Sources

Panel Im-Pesaran-Shin (IPS) Unit Root Test Results

Pedroni Panel Cointegration Test

Results of ARDL Panel (Long-run Parameters) for Tourist Arrivals by Country Groups (1996–2 01 8), Using Alternative Substitute Price Variable

Results of ARDL Panel (Short-run Parameters) for Tourist Arrivals by Country Groups (1996–2018), Using Alternative Substitute Price Variable

The author is an Economist in the IMF Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (OAP) in Tokyo. The paper was written with important contributions and support from Siegfried Steinlein and Takuya Kamoshida (both OAP). The author is also grateful for very helpful comments from Paul Cashin, Gee Hee Hong, Mariana Colacelli, Takuma Hisanaga, and informative discussions with officers from Japan Tourism Agency and Japan National Tourism Organization during the 2019 Japan Article IV mission. Excellent research assistance was provided by Qianmao Zhu and Yaming Chang during their summer internships at the OAP.

Nakazawa (2009) used a relative price of Japan’s consumer price index (CPI) with averaged third (i.e. non- source market) countries’ CPIs as a proxy for substitute prices in alternative destinations.

The Kanto region includes Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa, Tochigi, Gunma and Ibaraki. The Kinki region includes Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Nara, Mie, Shiga and Wakayama.

The total tourism expenditure includes total domestic spending on tourism by inbound visitors, domestic residents’ travel, and the domestic spending part of residents travelling abroad (outbound travelers).

See Japan National Tourism Organization at https://statistics.jnto.go.jp/en/graph/#graph--outbound--outgoing-transition .

See Dogru et al. (2017) .

Dwyer et al. (2000) utilize the tourists’ expenditure components and price at a disaggregated level to calculate the tourism price competitive index in 19 destinations, with Australia used as the benchmark.

For non-empirical studies, Henderson (2017) provides a comprehensive overview of recent trends in Japan’s inbound tourism and its key determinants. In detail, he reviews the recent development of the five principle determinants of tourism—national conditions, attractions and amenities, government policy, destination marketing, and access and mobility—in Japan.

Pesaran (1997) and Pesaran et al. (1999) show that the traditional ARDL approach can be used for long-run analysis, and that the ARDL methodology is valid regardless of whether the regressors are exogenous or endogenous, and irrespective of whether the underlying variables are I(0) or I(1) .

Refer to Section IV.B on data for the details of the definition of those dummies.

Followed Halvorsen and Palmquist (1980) , the impact of the multiple-visa dummy and the visa requirement dummy on tourist arrivals are calculated as (exp(β 4i ) – 1) and (exp(— β 5i ) – 1), respectively.

The data on tourist arrivals is released by the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO). The tourism arrivals data began in 20 05 for Vietnam. Although the data is available for Poland and Turkey from 2 013 and Mongolia from 2015, we exclude them from the dataset due to the limited number of observations. Their share in total tourist arrivals was 0.2% in 2018 combined. See Appendix Table 1 for the country list.

See Appendix Table 2 for list of data and sources.

For reference, in the ranking lists of most visited countries using United Nation World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) data, the Japan Tourism Agency highlighted ten Asian countries, in which the selected six countries/territories are closest to Japan’s rank. We also take into consideration the countries’/territories’ similarity by utilizing the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (T&T-CI) published by The World Economic Forum ( WEF 2017 ). The T&T-CI compares the overall tourism environment of 136 countries worldwide based on a detailed scoring system of 14 pillars.

Song et al. (2003) and Kumar et al. (2020) calculated the substitute prices using the same weight w c = T A c / Σ c = 1 S T A c for all source markets, with TA l being the total arrivals from substitute country c to the country with which the substitute countries are competing. This method is misleading when the objective is to measure the preferences of tourists from source markets. The data on outbound tourism from each source market to the substitute countries should instead be utilized to accurately capture the travel preferences of tourists from a specific source market.

The Japanese government adopted ordinances designating a disaster as a ‘specified disaster’ if it was particularly devastating. During the estimation period, four specified natural disasters occurred: the 2004 Chuetsu region tremblor in Niigata (2004Q4), the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami (2011Q1), the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes (2016Q2) and the 2018 torrential rain in western Japan (2018Q2).

See Appendix Table 1 for the countries in the different sub-gr o up s . The country categorization along income levels is in line with the International Monetary Fund’s classification as of August 20, 2019.

The six countries are India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The reason for the heterogeneity between the group of these six countries and China may lie in different preferences and, hence, spending patterns.

The results in Table 1 and Table 2 are from the same regression model (3) and presented separately for long-and short-run determinants.

As a robustness check, Pedroni panel cointegration tests are also performed. As shown in Appendix Table 4 , the results confirm the existence of a cointegration relationship among tourist arrivals and its determinants.

For a robustness check, we use another substitute price variable in line with the method in Asemota and Bala (2012) , to calculate the real effective exchange rate ( REER i,t ) of the origin country’s currency to the currencies of the alternative destinations. The results are shown in Appendix Tables 5 and 6 and suggest that the substitute price effects are now also applicable for non-Asian tourists. However, one caveat with this alternative calculation is that the origin country’s price level and the nominal exchange rate of its currency vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar will enter both the bilateral real exchange rate E i,t and the new substitute price variable ( REER i,t ) in the regressions, which might cause estimation bias.

See footnote 11.

The short-run parameters differ by source market and therefore can be presented at the country level. Results for the short-run parameters of each country are available upon requests.

La framboise et al. (2014) showed that higher-end destinations have lower price elasticity.

A Japan Tourism Agency (2019) survey showed that the most uncomfortable issues tourists encounter when traveling in Japan are lack of public Wi-fi, poor non-Japanese language skills by some residents, lack of multilingual signage, including for public transportation, and lack of cutting-edge payment settlement methods.

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Tourist Boom Making Seafood Bowls Too Pricey for Many Japanese

Chirashi Sushi Don or sashimi donburi, Japanese seafood rice bowl topped with mixed raw tuna fish, salmon roe, hotate scallop, engawa, crab claw meat, and wasabi. Japan famous traditional food concept

B ooming numbers of foreign visitors to Japan are driving up prices at restaurants near tourist spots, as a weaker yen makes the country a bargain destination and local wages struggle to keep up with a broader rise in costs.

Emblematic of this is the ¥6,980 ($46.52) sashimi-topped rice bowl at Toyosu Senkyaku Banrai , a new retail complex in Tokyo’s Toyosu area. It’s made with fresh seafood from the adjacent fish market, which was moved from the famed Tsukiji auction building in 2018. A similar kaisen-don meal, made with slightly lower quality ingredients, can be had for ¥1,000 to ¥1,500 in other parts of the city.

In January, 2.69 million people visited the country, up 80% from a year earlier and on par with pre-pandemic levels, Japan’s National Tourism Organization said Wednesday.

Earlier this month, the yen slipped past 150 to the dollar, putting the currency close to levels last seen in 1990 and making Japan an affordable destination for Americans and people from countries with stronger currencies. That, in turn, has helped to fuel a post-pandemic tourism boom, with hotels, restaurants and other retail businesses struggling to keep up with demand. But so far, domestic wages haven’t kept up and the economy tipped into a technical recession at the end of 2023.

“Income gains haven’t been able to keep up with rising prices,” said Atsushi Takeda, chief economist at Itochu Research Institute Inc. Even so, he said there’s a chance that rising prices will finally force consumers to seek higher wages and change spending habits.

Read More: Exclusive: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida Is Giving a Once Pacifist Japan a More Assertive Role on the Global Stage

Spending by visitors totaled a record ¥5.3 trillion in 2023, up by roughly 10% compared with the tally in 2019, before the pandemic, while spending per person increased by almost 34% to ¥212,000, data from the Japan Tourism Agency showed last month. Japan saw 25 million tourists in 2023, the largest number since 2019, when the country had 32 million inbound visitors.

Reflecting the spending power of this influx are other menu items going for eye-watering prices for locals. At the Niseko Tokyu Grand Hirafu ski resort in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, an eel rice bowl goes for ¥3,500 and one made with yakitori chicken skewers costs ¥2,000, at a food truck.

“I have to sell at these prices to cover costs,” said proprietor Naoya Hayakawa, adding that 95% of his customers are from overseas.

Visitors to Japan are seeking an experience that they can’t get at home, creating an opportunity for Japan’s food and beverage retailers to raise prices as much as 50% without denting demand, according to Lu Dong, founder of TakeMe Co., a payment and restaurant-reservation service.

Read More: Japan Is Releasing Wastewater Into the Pacific: What to Know About Radioactivity and Seafood

He advised a restaurant in Osaka to create a course menu catering to foreign visitors at a price point of more than ¥20,000. That boosted spending by tourists, said the shop’s chief, Yugo Fujimoto.

At the Toyosu retail complex, which combines restaurants, souvenir shops and spa facilities, 60%-70% of the long line at Edo Tsujiya, seller of the pricey seafood rice bowls, are tourists. Although they prepare around 300 meals daily, some items are often sold out by 2 p.m.

One of the customers, Alex Goldman, said that it would be impossible to get the same quality food at the same price in Chicago, where he’s from.

“I can only get this here,” he said as he tucked into the dish. “I want to come again.”

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Barcelona plans to shut all holiday apartments by 2028 as mayor seeks to tackle housing crisis

A man places two white banners with red and black writing on balcony fencing.

Barcelona, a top Spanish holiday destination, announced on Friday that it will bar apartment rentals to tourists by 2028, an unexpectedly drastic move as it seeks to rein-in soaring housing costs and make the city liveable for residents.

The city's leftist mayor, Jaume Collboni, said that by November 2028, Barcelona will scrap the licences of the 10,101 apartments currently approved as short-term rentals.

"We are confronting what we believe is Barcelona's largest problem," Mr Collboni told a city government event.

The boom in short-term rentals in Barcelona, Spain's most visited city by foreign tourists, means some residents cannot afford an apartment after rents rose 68 per cent in the past 10 years and the cost of buying a house rose by 38 per cent, Mr Collboni said.

two dozen people crows around a street drinking and socialising

Access to housing has become a driver of inequality, particularly for young people, he added.

National governments relish the economic benefits of tourism — Spain ranks among the top three most visited countries in the world — but with local residents priced out in some places, gentrification and owner preference for lucrative tourist rentals are increasingly a hot topic across Europe.

Local governments have announced restrictions on short-term rentals in places such as Lisbon, Berlin and Spain's Canary Islands in the past decade.

Spain's housing minister, Isabel Rodriguez, said she supported Barcelona's decision.

"It's about making all the necessary efforts to guarantee access to affordable housing," she posted on X.

Vacation rentals platform Airbnb, which hosts a significant number of Barcelona listings, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Collboni is making a mistake that will lead to [higher] poverty and unemployment," Barcelona's tourist apartments association, APARTUR, said in a statement, adding the ban would trigger a rise in illegal tourist apartments.

Hotels stand to benefit from the move. The opening of new hotels in the city's most popular areas was banned by a far-left party governing Barcelona between 2015 and 2023, but Mr Collboni has signalled he could relax the restriction.

Barcelona's hotel association declined to comment on Friday's announcement.

"Those 10,000 apartments will be used by the city's residents or will go on the market for rent or sale," Mr Collboni said of the measure.

Barcelona's local government said in a statement it would maintain its "strong" inspection regime to detect potential illegal tourist apartments once the ban comes into force.

No new tourist apartments have been allowed in the city in recent years. The local government has ordered the closure of 9,700 illegal tourist apartments since 2016, and close to 3,500 apartments have been recovered to be used as primary housing for local residents, it said.

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Russia’s fighters are waging bloody battles in Ukraine’s east to add to its captured territory.

Moscow supports this war effort with soldiers from outside the regular army, including some from a training camp in Chechnya.

Some join for the money, others to escape everyday drudgery, and some fight out of patriotism. But there are tearful goodbyes.

Soldiers trained in Chechnya range from battle tested mercenaries to raw recruits without combat experience.

Mayhem awaits them, as evident in the devastation of the city of Bakhmut.

Inside the Chechen Units Helping to Fight Russia’s War

Photographs by Nanna Heitmann

Text by Neil MacFarquhar

Nanna Heitmann spent time observing Russian troops training in Chechnya, then later traveled to Bakhmut, Ukraine. Neil MacFarquhar reported from New York.

A hulking military transport plane roared onto the tarmac at the main airfield in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic in southeastern Russia, and a group of 120 volunteer fighters heading for Ukraine clambered aboard.

Dressed in camouflage, the newly minted troops had just completed at least 10 days of training in Gudermes, near Grozny, at the Special Forces University, which accepts men from across Russia for general military instruction.

Some of the trainees lacked any combat experience. Others were veterans returning to Ukraine for their second or third tour — including former mercenaries from the Wagner militia, disbanded in 2023 after a short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin.

Six soldiers kneeling on cardboard to pray. They are all dressed in camouflage.

Some Wagner fighters, chafing at the idea of working for the Russian Defense Ministry, instead transferred whole units to the Chechen-trained forces, known as Akhmat battalions, intended in part to absorb fighters from outside the Russian Army. Wagner veterans were often first recruited from prison, including a lean man with a gold front tooth, identified only by his military call sign, “Jedi,” because of the potential for retribution.

“Go for your Fatherland? What kind of Fatherland? It kept me in prison all my life,” said Jedi, 39, a construction laborer who was convicted of robbery and fraud. In and out of jail since 14, he had six months left on a six-year sentence when he signed up.

“The volunteers go for the money,” he said. “I have yet to meet anyone here for the ideology.” He also wanted a clean slate, he said.

Fat signing bonuses plus payments of about $2,000 per month, at least double the average wage in Russia, have spurred recruitment.

The training near Grozny highlights the evolution of ethnic loyalties that is manifest in this war. Some of those now training there were last in Chechnya as young conscripts for the Russian Army, fighting against Chechens who were part of the separatist movement.

The participation of some Chechens represents another inversion of history: After hundreds of years of enmity with Russia, Chechens were deploying to Ukraine to fight Moscow’s war.

The separatist movement of the 1990s culminated in two brutal wars against Moscow that lasted intermittently for over a decade. The city of Grozny was flattened, and tens of thousands of Chechens died.

Chechnya is ruled by the strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Portraits of him and his father, Akhmat Kadyrov, can be seen all over Grozny.

Grozny, the capital, was entirely rebuilt after the Russian military flattened it during the Chechen wars.

The history of those wars is not commemorated the way other conflicts are, such as World War II.

A downtown photo exhibit chronicles both the devastation and reconstruction of the city.

Few traces of Grozny’s destruction remain. Today, new mosques and luxury boutiques stand amid the skyscrapers.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian leader of Chechnya, has taken an aggressive stance toward Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Chechen forces have claimed an instrumental role in some key battles, including the siege of Mariupol early in the war.

But Mr. Kadyrov has faced accusations that he has refrained from sending his fighters full-bore into the fight, with Chechens dying in fewer numbers than soldiers from other minority areas. Sparing his fighters keeps intact his private militia, the core of the security forces that ensure his rule in Chechnya.

Instead, Mr. Kadyrov has tried to underscore his loyalty to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by pouring resources into this military training center. The regimen consists of live fire exercises with artillery, some mining and demining instruction and first aid.

The various Akhmat battalions were named, like so much in Chechnya, after Mr. Kadyrov’s father, Akhmat Kadyrov, who switched sides to join Moscow in the separatist struggle and was then assassinated in 2004.

Russia has recruited troops for its war effort wherever it could find them, seeking to minimize the need for a draft. In 2022, it lifted an almost blanket ban on Chechens serving in the Russian military, fallout from the separatist movement.

Of the group being dispatched to Ukraine last fall from the tarmac in Grozny, many were in their 30s and 40s, and fewer than 10 were Chechens. Despite Jedi’s claims, money is not the sole motivation.

Some fled troubled domestic lives. Others wanted to escape daily drudgery. Some, of course, profess to be fighting out of patriotism. Many of the men agreed to talk on the condition that they be identified by only their first names or military call signs for fear of retribution.

Anatoly, 24, was among 10 men who volunteered together from a small farming village high in the mountains in the picturesque, south-central Altai region. “My father forced me to shovel snow, to work, to clear out the dung from the cows,” he said. “I ran away from this work to do something else. Every year is the same.” He admitted that the money was an incentive, too.

Another rural worker, a 45-year-old shepherd who uses the call sign “Masyanya,” traveled about 4,500 kilometers from the Republic of Khakassia for the training. “I’m going to defend my motherland, so the war doesn’t come here,” he said.

The contract with the Akhmat battalion lasts only four months, a big incentive when compared with the open-ended deployments for regular soldiers.

Last fall, Mr. Kadyrov formed a new unit, the Sheikh Mansour battalion, named after an 18th-century imam who fought against the Russian Empire. The soldiers are all Chechens or from the small, neighboring republics in the mountainous Caucasus region, and are mostly in their 20s. Chechens fighting for Ukraine against Russia named their battalion after Sheikh Mansour first, and now Mr. Kadyrov is trying to reclaim the name.

Turpal, 20, was working as a security guard for a large supermarket chain in Moscow when he got permission from his father to sign up for the new unit, saying that he wanted to fight against “those devils who are in Ukraine who want to bring their perverted ideas here.”

As he left to go back to the training center after a weekend visiting his parents, he hugged his mother and shook hands with his father. “Russia has been fighting for all its existence,” said Mayrali, Turpal’s father. “You can’t beat it. It is better for Chechnya to be with Russia than to be against Russia.”

Wagner veterans serve in the Sheikh Mansour battalion, too. A 35-year-old fighter who uses the call sign “Dikiy,” or “Wild,” said that he had served 18 months of a nearly 10-year sentence for murder when he signed up. He fought in Ukraine for 11 months, was wounded three times and still gets fierce headaches.

Back in Chechnya, he found the idea of working for $200 per month demoralizing, so he returned to the war. “I don’t know how to do anything else,” he said.

The Akhmat troops are better equipped than the regular army; unlike some regular Russian soldiers, they do not have to buy their own basic equipment.

Jedi said that when he first deployed with Wagner in Ukraine, some young men in the Russian Army came running up begging for supplies, for fuel and for bread. “In Akhmat, I don’t even wash my socks. I wear them, throw them away, wear them,” he said. “The same applies to underwear and bed linen. We have everything.”

Moscow subsidizes an estimated 80 percent of Chechnya’s budget, though it is unclear how much goes to military training.

At the airfield, before the battalion departed, a senior officer lined up the new soldiers to wish them good luck. “Are the fighters ready?” he shouted. “Yes sir,” they barked in unison, followed by the Muslim expression “Allahu akbar!” or “God is great!” plus the Chechen war cry, “Akhmat Sila!” or “Akhmat rules!”

Once they arrived in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, some of the men were assigned to maintain Russian control over Bakhmut, now an abandoned husk of a city after months of fierce fighting.

The streets are deserted, especially during the day, when Ukrainian drones roam overhead, hunting for targets. On foggy days, fighters can sometimes be glimpsed walking through the rubble.

Traffic rumbles to life at night, when the wounded from battles scattered around the Bakhmut region are evacuated. The roads are littered with burned cars and ambulances.

While the war grinds relentlessly above ground, the roar of artillery and exploding shells does not penetrate far beneath the surface, where the Akhmat forces have taken over a field hospital first set up by Wagner.

The Bakhmut region was once famous for its sparkling wine, and the hospital operates in the maze of underground tunnels where tens of thousands of bottles remain stored along the walls. (The prohibition on drinking it by both Wagner and Akhmat has been largely respected.) Once a tourist attraction, the old décor is still intact; dusty plaster statues of ancient gods loom over the wounded.

The caves are wide enough to accommodate at least two vans abreast, and several times a day, vehicles ferrying the wounded and the dead navigate the darkened, fog-shrouded labyrinth. Soldiers leap from the vehicles and quickly carry their often groaning comrades on stretchers to the makeshift stabilization point.

In Bakhmut, wounded Russian soldiers are treated at an underground hospital.

Though Russian forces captured the city last year, fighting in the vicinity remains fierce.

Medical personnel operate in rooms set up in a warren of tunnels that once served as a wine cellar.

The wounded are ferried on stretchers day and night as explosions boom in the distance.

Wounded soldiers wait to get treated at the underground hospital.

One of the surgeons, Bulya, 34, has worked for Wagner, mostly in Africa, since 2017. On trips to Moscow, he said, people there reacted to seeing him in his fatigues like “dirt under your fingernails,” but in Chechnya, he found more respect.

As losses pile up, Bulya said that he was eager for the Russian Army to make it to Kyiv. “I don’t need their negotiations,” he said using an expletive. “I hope that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will do that, that we will go to the end. We will get there.”

Anastasia Trofimova contributed reporting from Grozny and Bakhmut.

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States. More about Neil MacFarquhar

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Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pledge between their nations, a deepening of ties propelled by Putin’s need for munitions to use against Ukraine.

Mark Rutte, the departing prime minister of the Netherlands who has guided more than $3 billion in Dutch military support to Ukraine since 2022, is poised to become NATO’s next secretary general .

The European Union will impose economic penalties targeting some shipments of Russian natural gas for the first time, hoping to deprive Moscow of income.

Inside Russia’s Chechen Units: After hundreds of years of enmity with Russia, Chechens are deploying to Ukraine to fight Moscow’s war .

Narrowing Press Freedoms: Journalists in Ukraine say they are subject to increasing restrictions and pressure from the government , adding that the measures go beyond wartime security needs.

Belugas Escape Ukraine: A pair of beluga whales were transported out of danger in Kharkiv to an aquarium in Spain in an incredibly complex rescue .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

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The World Economic Forum has published its inaugural Travel and Tourism Development Index. It focuses on the growing role of sustainability and resilience in travel and tourism growth. Recovery for the sector is uneven and tourist arrivals in January 2022 were still 67% below 2019 levels, according to the World Tourism Organization.
$5 for locals, $30 for tourists: Japan tourist boom prompts ...
Tourist taxes are hardly new. Surcharges meant to target international visitors are often embedded in hotel receipts or as visa fees. ... $5 for locals, $30 for tourists: Japan tourist boom ...
How long will the travel boom last?
The holiday boom has lifted the outlook for international travel. Worldwide tourist arrivals this year are expected to reach up to 95% of pre-pandemic levels, up from 63% in 2022, estimates the UN ...
What the return of Chinese tourists means for the global economy
Hong Kong — the world's most visited city with just under 56 million arrivals in 2019, most of them from mainland China — could see an estimated 7.6% boost to its GDP as exports and tourism ...
Tourism will rebound after the pandemic
The emptying of tourist trails and resorts resembling ghost towns is causing massive upheaval. UNCTAD estimated that losses could amount to 2.8% of world output if international arrivals dropped ...
New York City Is Waiting for a Tourism Boom to Help Its Economy
NYC's hotel business travel revenue is expected to be down by 55% this year compared to 2019. The tourist downturn may delight New Yorkers on the streets who often bemoaned the masses of visitors ...
Iceland Wants Tourists
After a dip during the pandemic, Iceland received an estimated 2.2 million visitors last year, and is expected to welcome up to 2.5 million in 2026. New hotels and restaurants dot the capital ...
Japan gets more than it bargained for with tourist boom
ERI SUGIURA, Nikkei staff writer April 17, 2019 15:24 JST. TOKYO/KYOTO -- Yuko Kato, a 50-year-old housewife, was raised in Kyoto and has lived there all her life. Going to the 1,300-year-old ...
Destination Dictatorship : The Spectacle of Spain's Tourist Boom and
When the right-wing military dictatorship of Francisco Franco decided in 1959 to devalue the Spanish currency and liberalize the economy, the country's already steadily growing tourist industry suddenly ballooned to astounding proportions. Throughout the 1960s, glossy images of high-rise hotels, crowded beaches, and blondes in bikinis flooded public space in Spain as the Franco regime ...
Global tourism industry
In 2022, the global online travel market amounted to as much as 474.8 billion U.S. dollars, a figure that was forecast to exceed one trillion U.S. dollars by 2030. Some of the leading travel ...
The Boom And Bust Of Iceland's Tourism Bubble : NPR
The island nation's economy was reshaped by the tourism boom, and WOW's bankruptcy is changing things again. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Iceland is hot. It's one of the hottest tourist destinations in ...
Iceland Tourism Prepares for a Comeback
The country's decade-long tourism boom was disrupted by the pandemic, but Iceland is looking to the future, with an eye toward both accommodating and controlling large numbers of tourists ...
How Antarctica's tourist boom could affect Earth's 'last great
William Brangham: Welcome to the tourist boom at the bottom of the world. It's a front-row seat to a remarkable show, majestic humpback whales, frolicking fur seals, an army of curious, charming ...
Feeding a tourism boom: changing food practices and systems of
The tourism boom has not only led to a range of innovations in preparing food. Food networks have changed and new ones have emerged. One of the best examples is pizza. A large number of Hoi An's restaurants serve both Vietnamese food and pizza and pasta. It is curious how even the smallest tourist restaurants in Hoi An will offer wood-fired ...
Japan's Inbound Tourism Boom: Lessons for its Post-COVID-19 ...
The inbound tourist boom is highly concentrated in certain regions ("tourist hotspots") with in Japan. While f oreign tourist have s also increasingly been venturing into outlying areas, they remain highly focused on the Kanto region in and around Tokyo, the Osaka/Kyoto area (the Kinki region), Hokkaido, and Okinawa (Figure 2).
Iceland's tourism boom, reconsidered
Every tourist to Iceland travels through Reykjavik; the country as a whole gets over two million tourists but only has 300,000 residents. Before Iceland's precipitous rise in tourism a little ...
Secret to Iceland's tourism boom? A financial crash and a ...
The tourist boom is making some Icelanders uneasy. Another crash like the one that hit the banks is just a matter of time, and many said they are saving money or investing in hard assets.
Japan's Inbound Tourism Boom: Lessons for its Post-COVID-19 Revival
The inbound tourist boom is highly concentrated in certain regions ("tourist hotspots") within Japan. While foreign tourists have also increasingly been venturing into outlying areas, they remain highly focused on the Kanto region in and around Tokyo, the Osaka/Kyoto area (the Kinki region), Hokkaido, and Okinawa ( Figure 2 ).
Tourist Boom Making Seafood Bowls Too Pricey for Many Japanese
Emblematic of this is the ¥6,980 ($46.52) sashimi-topped rice bowl at Toyosu Senkyaku Banrai, a new retail complex in Tokyo's Toyosu area. It's made with fresh seafood from the adjacent fish ...
TOURIST BOOM definition and meaning
TOURIST BOOM definition | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples
Lake Tahoe has a staggering tourism problem, report shows
The greater Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, which includes all national forest lands around the basin, saw about 5.9 million visitors in 2020, while Yosemite reported just 2.27 million.By that ...
Barcelona plans to shut all holiday apartments by 2028
The boom in short-term rentals in Barcelona, Spain's most visited city by foreign tourists, means some residents cannot afford an apartment after rents rose 68% in the past 10 years and the cost ...
Barcelona Announces Plan To Ban Tourist Rental Apartments By 2028
The mayor of Barcelona intends to eliminate the 10,101 licensed tourist apartments currently in the city by November 2028. ... The boom in short-term rental apartments in Barcelona has caused a ...
Barcelona plans to shut all holiday apartments by 2028 as mayor seeks
The boom in short-term rentals in Barcelona, Spain's most visited city by foreign tourists, means some residents cannot afford an apartment after rents rose 68 per cent in the past 10 years and ...
Barcelona to ban tourist apartment rentals by 2028 to curb housing
The boom in short-term rentals in Barcelona, Spain's most visited city by foreign tourists, means some residents cannot afford an apartment after rents rose 68% in the past 10 years and the cost ...
Power outage hits Balkan states as heat overloads system ...
Air conditioners shut down and ice cream melted in tourist shops. ... Western Balkan nations have seen a boom in solar energy investment, meant to ease a power crisis that had threatened a shift ...
Inside the Chechen Units Helping to Fight Russia's War
The wounded are ferried on stretchers day and night as explosions boom in the distance. Wounded soldiers wait to get treated at the underground hospital. One of the surgeons, Bulya, 34, has worked ...