Japan wants more Middle East tourists but is it ready to cater to Muslim travelers from the region?
DUBAI - Japan is actively working on attracting more visitors from the Arab world in anticipation of the reopening of its borders to international tourists.
Visitors from the Arabian Gulf countries, especially, are known as big-spenders and they are a lucrative demographic for destinations worldwide. In the last five years Gulf visitors to Japan doubled to 28,222 in 2019, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), but this is less than one percent of the 31.9 million international tourists that visited in the same year.
So Japan is upping its game, with plans to open an office in Dubai in the second half of 2021. This will be JNTO’s first office in the Middle East and will support the country’s efforts to draw more tourists from the wider region.
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