Inbound
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Lunar New Year 2027: 4 Markets Converge Feb 6–9, Hokkaido ADR 1.18x
Posted: 2026.10.22Lunar New Year (Chinese New Year) 2027 falls on Saturday, February 6. The holiday periods of four markets — mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea — overlap on the four days from February 6 to 9, and in Hokkaido and Nagano, at the height of the ski season, the inbound peak and the domestic peak arrive in the same week. Lining up prefecture-level data from the Japan Tourism Agency's Overnight Travel Statistics Survey for 2025 (when Lunar New Year fell at the end of January) and 2026 (when it fell in mid-February) shows that the line-up of prefectures where foreign guest nights grew in February changed substantially, driven by the position of the holidays and shifts in the market mix. This article first confirms three years of holiday calendars from primary sources, then reviews the movement in February prefectural statistics, the market mix in the first half of 2026, and the estimated settled ADR and number of listed properties for February 2027 in six prefectures, giving operators and DMOs the material to plan which market to capture in which week.
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Japan Regional Inbound Share 34.8%, Yet Regional Nights Fell 0.9%
Posted: 2026.10.22Reading the Japan Tourism Agency's (JTA) Overnight Travel Statistics Survey for July 2026 (second preliminary release, published September 30) by region, the regional share of foreign guest nights rose to 34.8%, up 1.9pt from 32.9% a year earlier. Yet regional guest nights themselves came to 4.64 million, down 0.9% YoY. A rising share alongside a falling absolute number means the numerator (regional Japan) did not grow; rather, the three major metropolitan areas that make up the rest of the denominator shrank sharply, to 8.68 million guest nights (−9.2% YoY). This article decomposes the change in share into a "contribution from regional change" and a "contribution from the metro decline," confirms with nationality × region figures that the metro decline is concentrated in the China market, and then uses MetroEngines Research's estimated occupancy to show, prefecture by prefecture, how much inventory remains to absorb guest nights if they shift to regional Japan.
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Japan Foreign Guest Nights by Month 2014–2019: 2025 Up 55.6% vs 2019
Posted: 2026.10.18Foreign guest nights in Japan (final figures) totaled 115.66 million in 2019 (+22.7% YoY) and 179.92 million in 2025 (+9.4% YoY, +55.6% vs 2019). Both figures are taken from the annual final-figure press releases of the Japan Tourism Agency's (JTA) Overnight Travel Statistics Survey (宿泊旅行統計調査). When you need the number for a specific month — say, "inbound guest nights in November 2017" or "inbound demand in August 2018" — it is faster to scan the final figures in a single table than to hunt down each month's news release. This article lists the final monthly foreign guest nights for the 72 pre-COVID months from January 2014 to December 2019, sets them against the same months of 2023–2025 and their change vs 2019, and gathers the shift in seasonality, the annual trend in inbound travel spending, and the estimated settled ADR for Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto on one reference page.
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Diwali 2026 Nov 8: 76% of Indian Guest Nights in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto
Posted: 2026.10.18In 2026, Diwali (Lakshmi Puja) falls on Sunday, November 8. Combined with the Saturday before and the Monday after, travelers in some states, depending on their employers, may be able to take four days, starting from Dhanteras on Friday, November 6. In the visitor arrival estimates the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) published on July 15 and August 19, India was among the markets that set a record high for the month in both June 2026 (36,100 visitors, +26.1% YoY) and July (20,300, +10.9%). In absolute terms, Indian visitors to Japan are only a few percent of the Korean or Taiwanese totals. But per-capita travel spending is ¥249,000 and the average stay is 17.9 nights, both above the all-nationality average. This article uses Japan Tourism Agency statistics to identify the prefectures where Indian guests stay most, tracks inventory pickup for November 6–9 by lead time (LT), and overlays where properties are praised in reviews for vegetarian options and English-language service. Together, these show which prefectures and which kinds of property are positioned to capture this holiday period.
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Weak Yen & Inbound 2026: Hotel ADR +2% in Yen, −8% in CNY, +5% in KRW
Posted: 2026.10.15How far does the weak yen actually reach inbound travel? By MUFG Bank's published mid rate (TTM), the dollar stood at ¥160.02 at the end of August 2026 and ¥157.35 at the end of September, meaning the yen was more than 10% weaker at end-August and nearly 9% weaker at end-September than at the end of August 2024 (¥144.80). Meanwhile, the nationwide estimated transacted hotel ADR compiled by MetroEngines Research (the median of each of the 47 prefectures, weighted by the number of covered properties; 17,112 properties) was ¥11,500 in August 2026, just +0.9% versus August 2024. A room rate that is nearly flat in yen — how much of a price increase, or a cut, does it look like when re-measured in the currency in a visitor's wallet? This article lines up 33 months of estimated transacted ADR, from January 2024 to September 2026, for Japan as a whole and five major areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Hokkaido), converts each month at the month-end exchange rate into a currency-based ADR index (base = the same month of 2024), and overlays it on the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA)'s Overnight Travel Statistics Survey and JNTO's visitor arrivals by nationality to...
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Inbound Consumption Survey Explained: Q2 2026 ¥2.51tn, Lodging 36.6%
Posted: 2026.10.14The Inbound Consumption Trend Survey (インバウンド消費動向調査) is the Japan Tourism Agency's quarterly statistic on spending by foreign visitors to Japan; its former name was the Consumption Trend Survey for Foreigners Visiting Japan (訪日外国人消費動向調査). The name changed from the April–June 2024 survey, but neither the survey items nor the estimation method changed, so readers who arrived searching for the old name are looking at the same survey. The latest published figure is the second preliminary release for April–June 2026 (published September 30, 2026): foreign visitor travel spending was ¥2.5125 trillion (+0.3% YoY), of which accommodation accounted for ¥920.7 billion, or 36.6% of the total. This article is not a quarterly deep dive; it focuses on how to read the survey itself. Following the definitions in the published materials, it sets out who is asked what and how, how the first preliminary, second preliminary and final releases differ, what the five spending categories cover, and why "accommodation spend per person per night" — the figure hoteliers most often misread — is a different thing from their own ADR. For an analysis that reads the April–June figures against the lodging market, see our earlier article (April–June ¥2.5 trillion and the gap to market...
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Winter Inbound Beyond Snow: 4 Japan Prefectures at 27–29% Share
Posted: 2026.10.12Re-sorting the Japan Tourism Agency's Overnight Travel Statistics Survey for 2025 (final figures, January–December) by prefecture and month shows that December–February accounts for a larger share of foreign guest nights than the national average (24.9%) in 15 prefectures. Of those, only four are not snow country: Kagoshima, Oita, Saga and Yamaguchi. In all four, travelers from South Korea make up 36.2–50.5% of winter foreign guest nights, and onsen (hot springs) stand out in guest reviews. This article overlays winter ADR and room occupancy by property type for the four prefectures to identify which price bands still have room to grow in the winter season.
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Winter 2026 Flights as Seats: Narita +592/Day, Naha +242 vs Hotel Rooms
Posted: 2026.10.08Japan's FY2026 winter flight schedule begins on Sunday, October 25 and runs through Saturday, March 27, 2027. This article converts the frequency increases and new routes announced for this period by JAL, ANA, Peach, Jetstar Japan, Skymark and foreign carriers into daily arriving seats using "weekly round trips × aircraft seats," and sets them against the room stock, estimated settled ADR and recent occupancy of the nine prefectures that host the airports concerned. More seats do not automatically mean more hotel demand. Using range estimates that allow load factors and the share of international visitors to vary, we test, prefecture by prefecture, how much headroom the accommodation side actually has.
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Double Ten 2026 x Japan’s Long Weekend: Okinawa 90.8% OCC on Oct 10
Posted: 2026.10.05Taiwan's 2026 holiday calendar moves the National Day (Double Ten) holiday on Saturday, October 10 to the preceding Friday, October 9, creating a three-day weekend from Oct 9 to Oct 11, and moves Retrocession Day on Sunday, October 25 to Monday, October 26, creating another three-day weekend from Oct 24 to Oct 26. In Japan, Monday, October 12 is Sports Day, making Oct 10-12 a three-day weekend. As a result, the four nights from Friday, October 9 through Monday, October 12 become an "overlapping four days" in which the Taiwanese and Japanese long weekends coincide, offset by one day. This article uses the 2025 annual figures from the Japan Tourism Agency's Overnight Travel Statistics Survey to identify the prefectures where Taiwanese guest nights are concentrated. For five of them — Okinawa, Hokkaido, Fukuoka, Aichi and Kumamoto (with Tokyo and Osaka as references) — it then breaks down by property type how the four nights of Oct 9-12 differ from other October weekends, as observed on October 3. The second half checks the Oct 24-26 Retrocession Day weekend as a "second wave" using the same metrics, and also reports estimated settled ADR for October.
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Western Guest Nights H1 2026: Nagasaki +65%, ADR Up in Hokkaido/Miyagi
Posted: 2026.10.04Guest nights from eight Western markets (the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia) totaled 19.75 million nationwide in January–June 2026, up 0.5% year on year, according to the Japan Tourism Agency's Overnight Travel Statistics Survey (second preliminary release for June 2026, published August 31, 2026). While total foreign guest nights fell 6.7%, Western guest nights held flat, lifting their share of all foreign guest nights from 25.0% to 27.0%. Growth varied widely by prefecture, with regional prefectures leading: Nagasaki +65.4%, Ehime +55.2% and Kagoshima +43.8%. This article sorts out, prefecture by prefecture, where that growth carried through to room rates (estimated transacted ADR), and how autumn (October–November) inventory pace and capacity for longer stays are shaping up.