Earlier this year in October, Japan's Tourism Ministry created a plan to boost its revenue, which included giving away 10,000 free flight tickets to Japan. This plan was to recover losses due to the Big Tokyo Earthquake earlier in the March of the same year. A whole plan was devised: the applicants were to write an essay as to why they want to go to Japan on an Internet application and 10,000 lucky people were selected out of the pool. Those people would technically be their advertisement as they would spread their experiences of Japan onto the Internet. All was good... until the plan was cancelled.
Taken from The Wall Street Journal: "The Tokyo-based Japan Tourism Agency didn’t sugar-coat the decision in a statement on its website late Dec. 26: 'The project titled ‘Fly to Japan!’ (to offer flight tickets to 10,000 foreigners with high potential to communicate Japan’s attractions), which had been covered in a number of media in autumn this year, was not approved as a governmental draft budget of FY 2012.'" What would this mean, besides the fact that there are no more free flights to Japan? Well, the money Japan received from various other world powers is for the repairing of their destroyed cities and economy, instead of giving free flight tickets to foreigners (who may not actually even benefit their tourism industry). Well, it'd be a slap in the face to those people who wanted those free plane tickets to Japan. It's not free, guys.
Source: [The WSJ]
