The governor said he's convening a meeting of relevant agencies to come up with ways to deal with a decline in airline seats, including the Guam Economic Development Authority, the Guam Visitors Bureau, and the A.B. Won Pat International Airport Authority.

"We’ve got to actively find ways to replace those lost seats, whether it’s an existing airline, such as United or Japan Airlines, or looking for other opportunities, another option from other airlines," he said.

Calvo said Guam can also go back to Delta and ask whether it can reverse course.

"The Japan market has been our mainstay for decades and we cannot just allow and see this, a loss of nearly 200,000 seats, so we are going to make a big push on it. We'll get together an economic development team to see what we can do to get those seats back," he said.

Delta Air Lines discontinues Guam service after more than 30 years

Kevin Tano, Pacific Daily News

Delta Air Lines on Monday officially ended its flight operations on Guam, according to Rolenda Faasuamalie, airport marketing administrator.

The airline last September announced it would stop operating routes between Japan and Guam, with the last flight Jan. 8, because of a decline in the Japan tourism market.

The airline's departure from the Guam market is expected to result in a 35 percent reduction in airline seat capacity between Narita and Guam, but the Guam Visitors Bureau said Japan Airlines plans to operate a second daily flight to Guam from Narita, beginning March 25.

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Although it stopped operating on Guam, Delta continues to operate flights between Japan and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Japan and the Republic of Palau.

Daisy Sablan, Delta's station manager for Guam, said she would like to thank the people of Guam on behalf of the airline, which provided 36 years of service to the island. The airline first started operating on Guam in the early 1980s as Northwest Orient Airlines, then Northwest Airlines, before Northwest merged with Delta in 2008, changing its name.

Guam for most of 2017 experienced a significant drop in tourism arrivals from Japan, which had been the island's top tourism market for decades. In November 2017 alone, the most recent month for which data was provided, Japan arrivals declined 26 percent, compared to November 2016. That means 15,572 fewer Japanese tourists came to Guam last November.

From January through November 2017, Japan arrivals declined by 15.9 percent, compared to the same period in 2016, according to arrival reports from the Guam Visitors Bureau.

Despite the decline in the Japan market, Guam's total visitor arrivals from January to November of 2017 were slightly higher than the same period in 2016 because of a sharp increase in tourist arrivals from Korea.