The characteristics of accommodations in the early period of tourism development: The case of Okinawa

This paper aims at demonstrating the characteristics of the accommodations in the early period of the tourism development and determining the relationships between these characteristics and the price before it became a well-developed tourism destination focusing on Okinawa, Japan. Before Okinawa was returned to Japan, tourism markets were limited due to political reasons, though, tourism industries were developed and became a popular tourism site after the return of Okinawa. First, this paper conducted a principal component analysis (PCA) to identify the characteristics of the tourism accommodations. Two characteristics were obtained: one is for the characteristics of Western style hotels, the other is for Japanese-style accommodations which feature in traditional Japanese style rooms. Then a regression model was carried out to estimate the relationships between the price of accommodations and the characteristics obtained from the PCA. The estimation model showed that the characteristics of the Western style hotels more strongly influenced to the price, compared with those of the Japanese-style accommodations. Further, regional dummy variables were added to the model, which showed the price differences of accommodations between the cities and peripheral areas. Based on these results, Western style facilities were found to be more expensive before tourism development took off, and they were limited only in the part of areas in Okinawa.