THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
October 13, 2020 at 19:05 JST
Tourism Minister Kazuyoshi Akaba attends the Cabinet meeting at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo on Oct. 13. (Kotaro Ebara)
The government will boost funding for its popular "Go To Travel" campaign as operators of some major travel reservation websites have been forced to decrease the program's discounts for customers due to a funding shortfall.
Tourism Minister Kazuyoshi Akaba announced on the morning of Oct. 13 that the government will increase the funding for such operators. Under the campaign, the government subsidizes up to half the cost of a domestic trip to help sustain the travel industry battered by the coronavirus.
Flooded with reservations, leading websites such as Yahoo! Travel and Jalan were forced to reduce the discount per person, which ranges up to 14,000 yen ($130) per night of the stay, down to a maximum of 3,500 yen per night.
The government asked those website operators to return the discount to the initial amount. It said that the change will take effect by the morning of Oct. 14.
“People were confused and worried about it,” Akaba said. “I would like to make efforts to operate the project appropriately.”
The campaign subsidizes as much as 50 percent of domestic travel expenses through a travel discount of 35 percent and local shopping coupons for 15 percent. The maximum discount per person is 20,000 yen per night of the trip and 10,000 yen for a one-day trip.
The tourism ministry decided to allocate subsidies for each travel company mainly based on their sales plans to fairly distribute the government funding among them.
The funding was scheduled to be distributed to each company in a few installments. The first funds were allocated in September.
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