HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — After some post-typhoon uncertainty, Guam’s tourism agency said the island is on track to hit 1 million visitors next fiscal year.
Though projections for the local tourism rebound were dire just after Typhoon Mawar struck in late May, the Guam Visitors Bureau is seeing monthly visitor arrivals get back to normal. In fiscal 2024, the island could breach the 1 million visitor benchmark for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020.
“It’s not really a big jump when you think about it, because now that COVID is kind of behind us, (along with) all these restrictions on travel – PCR testing, all those requirements, everybody’s getting rid of them – there’s this pent-up demand that we’re seeing,” said Nico Fujikawa, GVB director of tourism research and strategic planning.
Barring a slump in arrivals through the month of June, when the island was focused on responding to the storm’s devastation, about 50,000 visitors have been touching down on Guam each month, according to Fujikawa. Visitor numbers were back up to 50,000 in July, the peak of tourism season, with the Korean market making a stronger-than-anticipated comeback.
“By next year, we should probably be closer to about 70,000 people monthly, and then the following year, maybe 90,000,” he said. “This year, we were supposed to hit 670,000, almost 700,000 people. The storm kind of knocked us off a little bit, but I think we’re still going to hit about 550,000, if not more.”
Airlines are bringing flight schedules back to normal after the typhoon, as well, Fujikawa said. Keeping airlines flying to and from Guam after the typhoon was a big goal at GVB; there are expected to be about 1.5 million airline seats available to Guam in the upcoming fiscal year.
Fujikawa said federal officials flying to Guam to help with typhoon recovery aren’t skewing projections, either.
“If you look around you, … there’s waves of Korean, Japanese (tourists) coming through,” Fujikawa said. Although federal officials did add to the arrivals, the numbers were “not as significant.”
All-time high
The ultimate goal of getting Guam back to fiscal 2019’s all-time high of 1.6 million visitors – more than 120,000 a month – may be achievable within another two to three years, Fujikawa said.
“I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to start normalizing, coming back to regular levels that we can maintain, probably around 2025 into 2026,” he added.
GVB isn’t the only entity that’s looking at that timeline, either.
“This is in line with other global travel associations,” Fujikawa said. “So we monitor what they’re looking at at PATA – which is the Pacific Asia Travel Association – the United Nations world travel organization, all these different conglomerates of tourism agencies are kind of putting in their thoughts together. They pull from our numbers, we pull from theirs, and everyone’s been tracking around 2025-2026 to get to 2019 levels.”
Tourists line up to board a Red Guahan Shuttle Bus at a Tumon bus stop on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023.
