Japan’s short-stay “love hotels” – many of which have been operating in the red for years – have received an unexpected boost from Chinese tourists.

Declining wages combined with an apparent lull in interest in intimacy among young Japanese has meant that dozens of love hotels have closed down in recent years, particularly those in rural areas or on the outskirts of larger cities.

Conversely, Japan is experiencing a serious shortage of accommodation for its booming tourist sector, with no hotel rooms available in popular destinations, such as Kyoto, for part of the year. Cherry blossom season in early April is a particularly difficult time to find a place to stay.

Enterprising travel firms have identified this discrepancy, however, and are booking entire love hotels for groups of Chinese tourists.

Buses of mainland holidaymakers have been congregating in districts where love hotels are clustered, according to Friday magazine, with the hotel operators tweaking their services to accommodate a different type of clientele.

Many of the guests are families with young children, so managers have responded by installing twin beds and removing coin operated sex toy dispensers.

Some hotels have even begun to employ Chinese-speaking staff and are reducing room rates to attract more frequent tourist parties.

With rooms starting as low as 3,500 yen (HK$243) a night, these properties are an attractive alternative to city centre hotels, where a lack of availability has meant that prices have soared more than 30 per cent from 2011 and presently average 17,500 yen a night.

Japan welcomed a record 19.73 million foreign visitors in 2015, an increase of more than 47 per cent on the previous year and significantly beyond the 13 million arrivals that tourism officials anticipated. The figure has broken the government’s own target.

Some 4.99 million mainland Chinese visited Japan in 2015, the largest single national group and more than double the previous year.

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