Tourist arrivals to Tinian, Rota soar

If visitor arrivals to Tinian and Rota during the month of January would be used as a barometer, the tourism industry should be expecting more sunny days for the rest of the year.

Visitor arrivals to the two islands increased last month, according to the Marianas Visitors Authority. Tinian registered a remarkable 309 percent increase in visitor arrivals while Rota saw an impressive 13 percent growth.

Despite the surge, however, Tinian still lags behind in total visitor arrivals to Rota.

For the whole of January, a total of 764 people visited Rota compared to 674 last year. Tinian, for its part, saw its visitor arrivals multiply more than three-folds to a robust 614 in January 2001 from only 150 in January 2000.

In terms of nationalities visiting the two islands, tourist from the United States topped the list with an aggregate total of 684. Japanese tourists came in second, with Korean tourists closing the top three with 516 and 96 visitors to the islands, respectively.

Coincidentally, visitor arrivals by nationality all registered marked increases with the top three — the US, Japan and Korea — again showing the biggest percentage increases.

A sore thumb on the visitor arrivals for the two islands was the low turnout of tourists from Taiwan. Department of Labor and Immigration data quoted by the MVA report showed only a total of five visitor arrivals from the Republic of China, all of them to Tinian.

That, however, can already be considered an improvement since the total number of Taiwanese who visited the two islands in January last year was nil.

The table released by MVA also indicated that all visitor arrivals during the month came by air, which only underscores tourists preference for traveling by plane rather than by boat.

Visitor arrivals to the Northern Marianas climbed 3.92 percent in January to reach 45,613, which shows that the island’s distressed tourism industry is slowly waking up from a three-year slumber that started in 1998.

Travelers from Japan have persistently positioned themselves as the prime source of revenues for the local tourism industry as the Marianas Visitors Authority disclosed a six-percent improvement on the number of Japanese tourists to the CNMI last month.

Last month’s growth in visitor arrivals from Japan came amid reduction in the number of charter flights between major cities in the North Asian country and Saipan.

MVA officials attribute the increase to the 5.8 percent improvement in passenger haul through direct flights from Japan to Saipan.

There were only four charter flights last month compared with January 2000’s nine. However, the growth may also be spurred by the arrival of two cruise ships in January, when scheduled ocean trips to the island from Japan were canceled last year due to concerns on computer glitches.

The honeymoon season and school holidays in South Korea also contributed to the overall growth of arrival statistics last month. At least 6,107 Korean travelers visited the CNMI, translated into a 24-percent increase from last year’s figures.