Inbound Tourism and Tourists’ Preferences for Accommodation Quality

Inbound tourism policies have increasingly shifted their focus from quantity to quality. To assess the effectiveness of this shift and to identify source countries whose tourists are particularly responsive to quality-oriented policies, this study examines the determinants of foreign tourists’ quality preferences using microdata from the Japanese accommodation sector. We find that, on average, foreign tourists accord greater value to accommodation quality than domestic tourists, although considerable heterogeneity exists based on country of origin. Quality preferences tend to be stronger among tourists from high-income countries but decline with distance from Japan. Thus, quality-oriented strategies can be effective even when targeting neighboring countries with relatively lower income levels.