Japan's Tourism Agency says the number of guests who stayed at hotels and inns during March reached a record high for the month.

The agency said the preliminary figure for the total number of people who stayed at accommodations in March is about 54.86 million, up 8.2 percent from the same month in 2023.

Among them, the total number of foreign guests is 12.7 million. This marks an increase of 68.2 percent from the same month last year and a rise of 33.4 percent from the pre-pandemic level in March 2019.

The total number of Japanese guests is 42.16 million, down 2.3 percent from a year earlier. But this exceeded the 2019 level by 1.3 percent.