Tourists make every penny counts

Twenty-eight year-old Yuki Takehata roams around Duty Free shop on Saipan with a Japanese catalogue comparing the prices of bags, shoes and clothes. A school teacher from Tokyo, Takehata wants to make sure that the Gucci bag she will be buying would still be far cheaper than the one’s sold back home.

Just like the thousands of Japanese tourists visiting the island, Takehata has become very cautious in spending her money as it takes her several hours to decide before buying anything in her favorite specialty stores.

For several weeks now, Duty Free has been offering a 30 to 75 percent discount on a number of items and Takehata said this has made it easier for her to decide what items to buy. “Many items in Japan are now cheap because the stores are also holding sales,” she said.

Retailers have been waiting for the Christmas surge to make up for a disappointing year which was rocked by the currency crisis in the region. To boost sales, many shops on the island have offered big bargains to lure shoppers but some say the results still fell short of expectations.

Although Japan’s economy has turned sour, Japanese still travel but they are a lot more careful now on how and where they spend their money. “If before they will not have second thoughts buying a bag worth $1,000 now, they will come back four times to the store just to make a decision whether or not they will buy a $100 key chain,” said Cecile, a sales clerk in Prada.

Sales in most shops today still pale in comparison before the onset of the regional crisis. For example, each sales clerk in Prada can deliver as much as $18,000 a day. Now, a sales clerk is lucky if her sale amounts to $1,000 a day.

Since the collapse of the Asian economies, retailers have had difficulty disposing of their stocks as sales have been sluggish for most of 1998. The arrivals of Japanese tourists last month who chose to spend Christmas in a tropical island, at least brought a little respite to some shops as consumption slackened for most of the year.

As tourism officials struggled to recapture the island’s lost market share in Japan, hoteliers and shop owners have expressed concern on the drastic change in the spending habits of Japanese tourists.

“When you have a guest who would rather buy a cup of noodles and stay in his or her room instead of eating in the hotel’s restaurant, it is definitely a problem of us,” said Ron Sablan, president of the Hotel Association of Northern Mariana Islands.

In 1998, hotels had an occupancy rate of 50 percent. This year, Sablan said the association hopes the hotels to maintain the same occupancy level even as they expect the effects of Asian financial crisis on the island’s tourism economy to get worse.

Japan, the CNMI’s main source of tourist, has been mired in a financial crisis when it plunged into deepest recession since World War II after the collapse of the speculative “bubble” economy of the 1980s.

Nobody knows exactly when the Asian crisis will end but many analysts are afraid that with the slowing of economies in the United States and Europe, Asian nations would have more difficulty clawing their way back to recovery.

With the double-digit decline of tourist arrivals, the Marianas Visitors Authority has launched Visit the Marianas ’99 campaign in a move to entice more Japanese visitors to come here.

Various activities have been lined up to make the island an exciting destination and give tourist value for their money. With the cutthroat competition in the travel industry, the CNMI seem to be losing its attraction as nearby Asian destinations offered cheaper packages due to the currency crisis in the region.

Travel agents have noted that Korea, which used to be the second biggest source of tourist of the CNMI, has become its biggest competitor in enticing Japanese tourist because of the cheaper packages it offer.

While they are hoping the situation to show some improve this year, MVA board led by chairman Dave M. Sablan has become more realistic in their projections.

“It is virtually impossible to bring back the arrivals record of the pre-Asian crisis because the problems in the region is simply beyond our control,” he said.

Despite the limited budget, MVA officials said they will try to tap other markets aside from continuing its promotional campaign in Japan limited budget. This include more focused plans in developing the alternative markets which include Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan.

“Our ultimate goal is to see our hotel rooms filled and see tourists roaming around the shops in Garapan this year. But an improvement each month in the decline of arrivals is one achievement which we’re happy to see,” the board chairman said.