Japan’s former capital experiences a historic first as inbound travel boom continues and Japanese travelers avoid staying in the city.

Recently, with Japan experiencing a surge in inbound international travelers, it’s not unusual to hear locals remark “These days, it feels like there are more foreign tourists in [sightseeing place] than Japanese people!” Oftentimes this is an exaggeration, but in the case of hotels in Kyoto, it’s the statistical truth.

The Kyoto municipal government recently released its tourism-related numbers for 2024, reporting that during the year 8.21 million foreign travelers stayed in hotels within Kyoto City. That’s the largest number ever, and a 53.2-percent increase from the previous year. It’s also the first time in history for more foreign travelers than Japanese ones to stay in Kyoto hotels, which received 8.09 million Japanese guests in 2024.

That figure of 8.09 million Japanese guests is down 13.8 percent from the year before, illustrating that as Kyoto becomes an increasingly popular destination for visitors from outside Japan, a growing proportion of Japanese travelers are choosing to stay elsewhere. Along with large crowds at sightseeing attractions and congestion on public transportation, Kyoto’s rising hotel prices are making it a less attractive place for Japanese travelers to stay. At the end of May, the Kyoto City Tourism Association announced the results of an April 2025 survey of room rates at 106 hotels within the city, finding an average per-night room price of 30,640 yen (US$211), the highest amount since the organization began tracking the average price in 2014 and also the first time for it to go past 30,000 yen. With a favorable exchange rate to take advantage the higher hotel rates may not be much of a deterrent to foreign tourists, but for the local Japanese population already struggling with increasing consumer prices, hotel rate hikes in Kyoto aren’t nearly so easy to brush off.

Surprisingly, even as Kyoto’s hotels welcomed fewer Japanese travelers in 2024, the city itself still had an increase in Japanese sightseers, with an estimated total of 45.18 million Japanese people spending some amount of travel time within the city. That number is up 4.6 percent from 2023, and coupled with the drop of Japanese Kyoto hotel guests for the same period indicates that many Japanese visitors were either from-home day trippers or stayed in hotels outside of Kyoto City. On the other hand, the 10.88 million foreign tourists who visited Kyoto in 2024 were a 53.3-percent increase over the previous year, almost exactly the same increase as that for foreign Kyoto hotel guests.

The situation hasn’t been at all bad for Kyoto’s bottom line. Tourism-related spending in the city was up significantly in 2024, with visitors spending an estimated 1.9075 trillion yen, another record-breaking figure and a 24.1-percent increase from the year before. As such, the city is unlikely to enact any drastic policies to pump the brakes on inbound international tourism, but as the city gets more crowded and more expensive, it also gets closer to a tipping point where Japanese travelers might think it’s no longer worth visiting.

Source: City of Kyoto, Kyoto City Tourism Association via Nihon Keizai Shimbun (1, 2)
Top image: Pakutaso
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