Digital

Travel Voice interviewed Tracey Weber, senior vice president and general manager of the Expedia brand, to know how Expedia sees the current Japanese market and the future travel trends.

Wayve, an AI technology developer for automobile, Uber Technologies and Nissan Motor are working together for development of AI-based autonomous driving ‘robo-taxi' in Japan.

Oricon, a survey and analysis company, announced the user satisfaction ranking for general OTA, activity booking OTA and hotel meta-search in Japan.

Three Mitsui Fudosan’s hotels started offering a room key service using Apple Wallet, which allows a guest to open not only a room but also facilities in the hotels.

No.1 travel website with the most word-of-mouth posted in 2025 was Booking.com, followed by Google. The top 2 had a share of about 50% of the total.

Trip.com will begin selling Shinkansen tickets in partnership with four JR companies, offering purchase opportunities to international visitors to Japan in their respective languages.

JR East, will launch a new online booking system for Shinkansen ‘JRE GO, which allows a user to complete a booking as little as in one minute.

New BtoB settlement service in linkage with ‘TEMAIRAZU,’ a platform for an accommodation to manage bookings from multiple global OTAs, enables an OTA to send money to an accommodation, using Mastercard’s VCN.

Japanese major digital wallet service ‘PayPay’ signed a strategic partnership with Visa to build a global PayPay ecosystem. The first global market will be U.S.

Linktivity, an e-ticket platform of Japan, has extended its sales network for Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium to allows global OTAs to sell the tickets to their users.

LINE Yahoo has begun providing a new AI function to recommend spots in a destination on ‘AI Assistant.' 46% felt a time-consuming burden on finding tourist spots in planning a travel.

NAVITIME JAPAN has begun offering a generative AI-based tourism guide solution exclusively for local governments, DMOs or tourism operators. AI automatically answers queries from travelers instead of staff.

JR EAST, a railway company of Japan, will begin offering a new railway pass ‘JR EAST PASS’ for international visitors to use all lines in JR EAST area and part of private railways.

The latest JTB Tourism Research & Consulting’s survey finds generative AI is rapidly used as a method in gathering travel information, and communication method has been shifting from words to images.

Skyscanner and HIS talked about the recent Japanese overseas traveler trends based on their data. Skyscanner introduced a logical travel as a new travel style to maximize cost performance.

Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) and USEN-ALMEX have begun testing the next generation hotel check-in system using international-standard digital passport, targeting travelers from South Korea first.

Hakone DMO, a local DMO in popular tourist destination in Japan, and TripX, a AI development startup, officially released ‘RecRing,’ an AI-based restaurant reservation service for international visitors.

[PR] ‘Digital Travel APAC 2026’ will be organized as a travel-tech event in APAC for two days from March 24 to 25 2026 in Singapore, designed for travel-tech leaders in all sessions. The theme is ‘Reimagining Travel in APAC: Smarter, Deeper, More Human.'

JTB drew up a new long-term vision ‘OPEN FRONTIER 2035’ for 2035. Under the vision, ‘exchange creation intelligence’ is placed as a source of the JTB group’s values and a base supporting higher and more diversified exchanges.

According to NAVITIME JAPAN data, Shizuoka was the top airport international travelers from Asia arrived , and Naha from Europe, U.S. and Australia.