Die Präfektur Kagoshima steht in der Kritik, weil sie ausländischen Touristen kostenlose Hinfahrtskarten für den Shinkansen anbietet. Manche beschweren sich, es handele sich um eine Vorzugsbehandlung für Ausländer, die nicht mit Steuergeldern finanziert werden dürfe.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/1e508a61a1c728aa33ae532f872a599976983c40
13 Kommentare
I think it’s a disgrace, give the foreigners free tickets while everyone else is paying a good 12,000 yen one way. Do foreigners know how expensive 12,000 yen is? It’s more than a days wage, 2 days for quite a few. They must be desperate for that suit and juicy tourists money.
Yet, JR are raising the prices of regular fares. No wonder there’s such an anti foreigner sentiment.
If it’s Kagoshima collected tax and there’s a business plan to attract more money in the end then it’s a sound plan.
They just need to clarify the amount of foreign money that flows in to Kagoshima vs the amount spent on this plan.
If foreigners are coming to Kagoshima using their free tickets then leaving without spending much, then yes, I do agree that it’s a failed endeavor. But if both the government of Kagoshima and the private sector find ways to make money off of them I can see this being a net plus. Also as the southern tip of Kyushu you can even potentially “trap” tourists with a free one-way ticket by making it easy to come in but difficult to leave, like casinos in Vegas
I don’t think the math behind the idea is necessarily terrible. If you can rope someone into going **all the way down** to kagoshima, they are going to spend money on food, hotels, general tourism stuff before most likely buying a ticket back to wherever their airport is.
The question is how much of that money spent per tourist comes back to prefecture when all is said and done? There might be some merit in at least trialing it.
There are plenty of intangible costs to consider that you can’t really put a yen figure on.
Break off some of the profits from all the foreign tourists and bring back ‚Go-to Travel‘ subsidies for the locals again.
Just can’t make the Japanese happy man. If it were up to them, foreigners would fly in, leave bags of cash at the airport, and leave. They want it to be like Dubai but without the F you levels of natural resources. Good luck with that.
They do know that it attracts tourists who will spend infinitely more in the prefecture than what’s spent with tax money
As predicted…
If enough Japanese tourists were going don there this probably wouldn’t be happening.
How many of the complainers have been supporting the area?
Sounds like I should try to visit Kagoshima if it gets opened to foreign residents.
Japanese people: Tokyo and Kyoto is too crowded! Overtourism is crazy!! Help us!!
Japanese government: ok here let’s do this so that the tourism will be more spread out and not concentrated to a couple of the main cities, as well as help bring in money to smaller towns and cities in Japan
Japanese people: NO NOT LIKE THAT
can’t make these people happy at all.
I wish they would bring back the Covid era cheap train passes just for foreign residents.
I imagine most residents wouldn’t take the train all the way down, due to the expense, but fly instead. So would be nice to see this offered to residents too…but like many of the rail passes I can’t see it happening.