Photo/Illutration Tourism minister Kazuyoshi Akaba speaks at a news conference about the government’s “Go To Travel” campaign on July 21. (Naoyuki Takahashi)

The government has again bent to sharp criticism concerning its beleaguered “Go To Travel” tourism campaign.

Reversing an earlier stance, tourism minister Kazuyoshi Akaba said on July 21 that the government will cover cancellation fees for trips booked to and from Tokyo, which was recently excluded from the subsidy campaign over the surge in novel coronavirus infections in the capital.

“As for cancellation fees, people don’t need to pay them,” Akaba said at a news conference after a Cabinet meeting.

The government has already advised tourism agencies not to receive cancellation fees from those who booked such trips. If travel companies have already received the fees, they will need to return the payments.

Those who made travel reservations between July 10 and July 17 will be eligible for refunds of the cancellation fees.

The cost for covering the fees will come from 1.35 trillion yen ($12.59 billion) set aside for the tourism campaign, which will subsidize up to half of the cost of a domestic trip.

The decision followed a storm of criticism from opposition parties and the public against the government’s initial position of not covering the fees.

The nationwide campaign is designed to help the tourism industry, which has suffered severely from a dearth in visitors since the novel coronavirus outbreak early this year.

The government on July 10 announced that the start of the campaign would be moved up to July 22 from the initially scheduled August and cover all destinations and residents in Japan.

However, concerns were raised around the country that travelers could spread the virus, particularly from the capital, where new COVID-19 cases were increasing.

In response, the government officially announced it will exclude all Tokyoites and trips to and from the capital from the program on July 17, when the daily number of new COVID-19 cases in Tokyo hit a record 293.

Akaba told a news conference at that time that the government had no intention of reimbursing people for cancellation fees over their scrapped trips.

Similarly, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government was not thinking about specific steps to deal with the cancellation fees, leaving the matter to travel agencies.

Opposition lawmakers and even members of the ruling coalition questioned that stance.

“The government is the one that needs to do something about it,” said Noritoshi Ishida, chief of the Policy Affairs Research Council of Komeito, the junior coalition partner of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party.

A recent Asahi Shimbun survey showed that 74 percent of voters oppose the July 22 start of the tourism campaign with the novel coronavirus still not under control.

(This article was written by Ryutaro Abe and Naoyuki Takahashi.)

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