Sixteen nations gathered last week in the beautiful lake city of Otsu, Japan to attend the 42nd meeting of the WTO Commission for East Asia and the Pacific…
Sixteen nations gathered last week in the beautiful lake city of Otsu, Japan to attend the 42nd meeting of the WTO Commission for East Asia and the Pacific and the technical seminar on Sustainable Management of the Landscape and Environment for Tourism.
With 29% incredible growth rate for 2004 in international tourist arrivals, East Asia and the Pacific has become the most dynamic tourism region in the world and the balance of power in tourism is moving to East Asia and the Pacific, said Dawid de Villiers, WTO Deputy Secretary-General who opened the events on behalf of the Secretary-General. Upbeat with more than just recovery from 2003, tourism in East Asia and the Pacific for 2004 marked another year of great achievements in the industry. A number of new marketing initiatives have come out e.g. the Yokoso Japan Campaign, Dynamic Korea, Indonesia: Ultimate Diversity and Discover Hong Kong year. Furthermore, quite a few NTAs have reported to the Commission on their government`s relaxation of visa formalities such as Vietnam and Indonesia.
Japan has always been a major tourism generating market – sending tourists in large numbers as visitors to countries around the world. It has not been renowned for its efforts to attract large number of visitors to Japan. That has been changed by the Prime Minister`s announcement of April 2003 to initiate a Visit Japan Campaign, setting an ambitious but reachable target of 10 million international arrivals by 2010. The government further announced that Japan will be a nation to be built on tourism – a pleasantly surprising move for an industrialized nation. The meeting decided finally to have its annual gathering for next year in the dynamic destination of Macau.
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