Tourists use a Tumon crosswalk near the Westin Resort Guam on Sept. 4, 2025.
Photo by Frank San Nicolas/The Guam Daily Post
HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — A newly released report on Guam’s 2024 visitor economy by international research firm Tourism Economics shows a 12.5% increase in year-on-year visitor arrivals of 739,000 compared to 657,000 in 2023. But that’s still just 44% of the record, pre-Covid 2019 level of 1.66 million.
The report stated that visitors spent $1.1 billion in Guam last year, or 6.7% more than in 2023, and the total impact of visitor activity was $1.4 billion.
The Guam Visitor’s Bureau contracted Tourism Economics to quantify the significance of the Guam visitor economy and develop a comprehensive analysis of visitor spending and its total economic impact on businesses, employment, personal income and taxes.
Visitor volume
Korea and Japan remain the top two origin markets for Guam. 78.9% of visitors came from those two countries in 2024, but that combined share was 7 percentage points lower than the 86.3% in 2019, according to the report.
Most of the drop could be attributed to Japan, which the report said is far from recovered. Japan’s share of visitor volume in 2024 of 28.2% was significantly lower than its 2019 share of 41.1%, “and that lower share is of a much lower total volume as well,” the report stated.
One interesting data point in the report that illustrates the impact of the pandemic on the visitor industry shows that arrivals from the continental United States and Hawaii accounted for 61% of the market in 2021. Meanwhile, Korea and Japan arrivals accounted for just 16.4% that year, as the global tourism industry shut down.
Visitor spending trends
Visitor spending increased to just over $1.1 billion in 2024, an increase of 6.7% from 2023. Still, the 2024 spending level was nearly 40% below the 2019 peak of $1.8 billion, according to the report.
The report said visitor spending growth in 2024 was led by strong changes in retail (+18.9%) and recreation (+9.0%) expenditures.
“In the last three years, visitors have shifted towards these two categories, while they spent smaller shares on food, lodging and local transportation,” the report stated.
Of the $1.1 billion in direct spending, lodging accounted for the largest share, $444 million, or 41%, followed by retail spending of $275 million, or 25% of the total.
Direct employment
Visitor-supported employment increased to 10,786 jobs in 2024 compared to 10,378 in 2023, an increase of 3.7%. Visitor activity supported a significant portion of direct employment in several key industries in Guam, according to the report.
Visitors sustained nearly all employment in the lodging sector, 64% of food services employment, and 49% of recreation employment. Overall, direct visitor-supported employment accounted for 17% of all jobs in Guam in 2024, the report stated.
Employment impacts
Total employment impacts of the visitor industry tallied 14,392 in 2024, or 21.5% of all jobs in Guam. According to the report, there were 11,652 direct jobs, 1,229 indirect jobs, and 1,511 induced jobs, or jobs created from the spending of those with direct and indirect jobs.
According to the report, tourism demand generated $310 million in direct personal income in 2024. Including indirect and induced impacts, employees received a total of $393 million in personal income.
Meanwhile, direct government tax revenues totaled $151.3 million from tourism in 2024, a 7% increase over 2023’s $141.4 million. That’s still well off the $238.6 million in tax revenue in 2019.
The report said without the tourism industry, “each household in Guam would need to be taxed an additional $3,444 to replace the visitor-generated taxes received by local government in 2024.”
Overall economic impact
According to the report, all direct spending, including visitor spending and TSA components, amounted to $1.1 billion in Guam in 2024. These direct impacts generated an additional $0.3 billion through supply chain (indirect) and income (induced) effects. As a result, the total economic impact of visitors reached $1.4 billion in 2024.
