The Return Trip

There is a small bakery in Tumon that my family has made a habit of visiting, and I have been trying to understand why. The bagels are good — genuinely good, which is itself a minor miracle on a Pacific island — but I do not think that is the reason we keep going back. By our third visit, the staff already knew our order. By our fifth, they were asking how the week had gone. There is a particular pleasure in being recognized somewhere far from home, and if you have ever felt it, you will understand why it is so difficult to replicate with a marketing budget.

Guam welcomed 739,000 visitors in 2024, a twelve-and-a-half-per-cent improvement over the prior year, and the Guam Visitors Bureau greeted the news with something approaching relief.¹ The number deserves the warmer reception, but not an uncritical one. Seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand arrivals represents forty-four per cent of the visitors the island received in 2019, and total visitor spending remains nearly forty per cent below its pre-pandemic peak.²,³ The promotional response has been to spend more: five million dollars in Korea marketing, three-point-eight million in Japan, and a sustained effort to convert the memory of Guam into a booking.⁴ What receives less scrutiny is whether the problem being solved is the right one. Guam, by most available measures, does not struggle to attract first-time visitors. It struggles to bring them back.

The distinction is worth dwelling on. A visitor who returns spends more per trip, requires no acquisition cost, and tends to describe the place to others with the specificity that paid advertising cannot manufacture. Thailand, which received around 35 million tourists in 2024 and reclaimed its pre-pandemic footing well ahead of most comparable destinations, has structured its entire hospitality industry around this logic.⁵ Bangkok recently reclaimed the top spot in Agoda's Repeat Visitor Rankings among Asian cities.⁶ The Tourism Authority of Thailand has long reported that roughly sixty per cent of the country's international visitors are people who have been before.⁷ That figure is not accidental. It is the output of a country that decided, some decades ago, to treat every interaction between a visitor and a service worker as something worth getting right.

Thailand calls itself the Land of Smiles — a phrase that sounds like a brochure claim but turns out to describe something real about the way the country's hospitality industry operates. When visitors feel genuinely welcomed in the early hours of a trip, research consistently shows, they relax into spending more freely, staying longer, and rating the experience more generously — and they book again.⁸,⁹ A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology, drawing on extensive data across international hospitality enterprises, found that the quality of personal encounters with service staff was the single most reliable predictor of repeat visitation, outranking physical amenities, price, and the novelty of the destination itself.¹⁰ The hotel pool is rarely why anyone comes back. The person who remembered your name is.

Guam has a cultural foundation for exactly this kind of hospitality. The Chamorro value of inafa'maolek — a principle of mutual care and collective responsibility for the well-being of others — is not a marketing concept. It is a lived orientation that, when expressed consistently and supported by real investment in staff training and retention, becomes the thing visitors describe when they try to explain why the island felt different. The difficulty is that cultural dispositions do not survive indifferent institutions. Thailand built a system around its people. Guam has the people and has not yet built the system.

The question of what draws visitors in the first place is worth addressing honestly, because the answer shapes where investment should go. Korea and Japan together account for seventy-eight-point-nine per cent of all arrivals to Guam.¹¹ These travelers are not primarily booking for a cultural immersion — they are choosing the most accessible version of the United States available to them, at roughly three and a half hours' flight time from Seoul and Tokyo, without the visa complications and transit distances of a mainland trip.¹² America is the product. This is not a diminishment of what Guam is; it is a clarification of what it is selling. The latte stones, the kelaguen, the Wednesday night market in Hagåtña — these are not the headline. They are the texture that makes Guam feel distinct from Honolulu, the impressions a visitor describes when explaining why the place was worth the trip. Research on destination loyalty has consistently found that cultural heritage rarely drives the initial booking decision but reliably shapes the desire to return.¹³ "America in the Pacific" fills the seat. The culture earns the second ticket.

Building the conditions for repeat visitation requires attention to several things that tourism marketing tends to treat as someone else's problem. There is the matter of food. Guam has no signature dish — nothing that a visitor boards a plane specifically to eat, nothing that functions as the organizing memory of a trip. The most widely available Chamorro cooking that non-Chamorro visitors encounter runs to charcoal barbecue that can tend toward the oversalted, earnest in its presentation but not yet transcendent in its effect. This is fixable in ways that have been fixed before. Pad Thai, now one of the most internationally recognized national foods on earth, was not an artifact of Thai culinary tradition. It was engineered in the 1930s by a government that needed to redirect consumption away from rice during wartime, standardized the recipe, and distributed it through subsidized street vendors.¹⁴ Within a generation, it had become the thing foreigners meant when they said they missed Thailand. Guam sits at the convergence of Chamorro, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and American food cultures — a richness that has not yet been deliberately exploited. A structured culinary initiative, built around collaboration between local cooks and accomplished chefs from the island's primary visitor markets, could produce something genuinely original: a dish that exists nowhere else and travels back to Seoul and Tokyo in the form of a craving.

There is also the matter of what visitors actually encounter when they eat out. Guam's Division of Environmental Health maintains eight inspectors for approximately three thousand health-regulated establishments, and currently conducts around twelve hundred inspections per year — roughly ten per cent of its legally mandated rate, with some restaurants going four years between reviews.¹⁵,¹⁶ The argument for adequate inspection capacity is usually framed in public-health terms, and rightly so, but it is equally a tourism argument. Destination trust — the reasonable confidence that any given meal will be safe, that any given kitchen meets a predictable standard — is the invisible infrastructure on which repeat visitation rests. A visitor who gets sick does not come back. A visitor who suspects they might get sick does not either.

And then there is what happens at the end of the meal, when the screen rotates and the numbers appear — twenty per cent, twenty-five per cent, thirty per cent. For an American traveler, this is a familiar if increasingly fraught ritual. For the seventy-eight-point-nine per cent of Guam's visitors who come from Korea and Japan, cultures where tipping is not practiced and can register as a mild affront to the professionalism of the server, it is something else: a small, recurring signal that the place was designed for someone else. The late Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on human judgment and decision-making, observed that people evaluate experiences not by averaging every moment but by how they end — which means a pressured, confusing transaction at the register can retroactively shadow an otherwise excellent afternoon.¹⁷ A 2025 study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management confirmed that tipping prompts in counter-service settings triggered negative emotions and measurably reduced customer satisfaction — the precise effect that determines whether someone plans a return.¹⁸ The remedy does not require legislation. It requires a decision, made by a restaurant owner willing to absorb wages into pricing and post a small sign near the door: no tipping, service included, every customer treated the same.

The Legislature could make one change that would ease conditions for all of the above. Guam's Business Privilege Tax, currently set at five per cent after a 2018 increase that was framed as temporary and has since become permanent, applies to unprepared food.¹⁹ Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia exempt groceries from equivalent taxes.²⁰ The effect of taxing food ingredients is to raise costs throughout the supply chain — at the grocery store, at the restaurant, at the point where a cook decides whether to source better produce or make do with what the margin allows. Legislation exempting unprepared food from the BPT has already been introduced.²¹ The standard objection — that businesses absorb tax relief rather than passing it along — holds more force for broad-based cuts than for a targeted grocery exemption whose primary beneficiaries are households and small food establishments.

The bakery in Tumon, as far as I can tell, has not studied any of this. It has simply made a decision — repeated daily, in small gestures, across every transaction — to make people feel that returning is worth the trip. In a destination that spent a decade building toward nearly two million visitors a year and now receives fewer than half that many, that decision is not incidental. It is the strategy. What this island needs, more than a larger marketing budget or a more aggressive promotional calendar, is the will to do the same thing — not at one bakery in Tumon, but everywhere a visitor might walk through a door.