Travellers' Checks | Ishigaki, Japan, tops TripAdvisor list of destinations on the rise – are we missing something?
Our travel writer is perplexed by the travel website’s choice of the sleepy island, which, although charming, is far from being a tourist hot spot, with just one international flight serving it; lucky for some, that flight is from Hong Kong
This tiny Japanese island, while undeniably appealing, didn’t seem much like a burgeoning tourist Mecca when I was there a couple of months ago. And with only one international scheduled flight serving the local airport, what tourists there were were mostly Japanese.
TripAdvisor’s reasoning for this unlikely accolade is buried in talk of algorithms, year-on-year increases and traveller feedback, and is clearly flawed since, even if this southwesterly outpost of Okinawa does catch on among international travellers, the options for getting there are severely limited.
