News

DMO KYOTO announced that the occupation rate of 35 hotels in Kyoto City was 31.1% in the New Year holiday period, and 63.8% of all bookings in the period were cancelled following the announcement of the tentative suspension of 'Go To Travel' nationwide on December 14 2020.

Japan Railway East will operate a special remote-work train car on the Tohoku Shinkansen line for business travelers, looking for a new business opportunity under new normal lifestyle.

Public and private exhibitors for Tourism EXPO Japan Tokyo Business Meetings & Travel Festa deliver messages online because the event was cancelled amid the state of emergency declaration in Tokyo.

The Japanese government has decided to suspend business and residence tracks between Japan and 11 designated countries and regions until February 7 2021 to prevent a new variant of COVID-19 from flowing into Japan.

Sharing Economy Association says that the sharing economy market scale of Japan is expected to reach 2.1 trillion JPY in FY2020 and to grow to 14.2 trillion JPY without any anxieties about COVID-19. The market scale of space sharing services including private home sharing will amount to 342.9 billion JPY in FY2020.

According to the new DMO guideline, Japan Tourism Agency canceled registrations of seven DMO candidates, while approving registration renewals of all 41 registered DMOs.

Following the the state of emergency declaration until February 7, ANA and JAL will cut additional domestic flights, reducing operation rate to around 56% during the period.

ANA and JAL reduced their domestic flight passengers by around 60% year on year and dropped the load factors to 40% during the 2020-2021 New Year holiday period, largely affected by suspension of the domestic travel recovery program 'Go To Travel' nationwide.

The Japanese government declared the second stare of emergency in Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa and Saitama on January 7 for a month until February 8, while Prime Minister Suga showed a willingness to host Tokyo Olympics this summer.

Japanese guest nights in 66 hotels were up 42.8% year on year in November 2020, which was the largest YOY growth since the survey began.The average occupancy rate was 63.2%, 22.2 points higher than October (41.0%), improving for seven months in a row.

The total number of Japanese guest nights was down 15.7% to 34.2 million in November 2020, improving from a 35.2% reduction in October 2020 clearly because of ‘Go To Travel,' and international guest nights increased from 270,000 in October 2020 to 440,000 due to the limited ease of the entry rules.

Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) surveyed the relevance between inbound travelers’ needs and spread of COVID-19 in Taiwan and Hong Kong as short-haul markets and U.K. and Australia as long-haul markets, giving insights toward reopening of the inbound travel market in the future.

45% of Japanese respondents are interested in vacation rental as on option of accommodations, selecting ‘condominium or apartment' as the top, although the awareness rate is still low at 19%, according to Expedia survey.

Japan will suspend new entries from all of foreign countries and regions until January 31 2021 to avoid possible inclusion of new variants of COVID-19, and the 14-days quarantine exemption for short-term business travelers will also be suspended.

‘Go To Travel,’ the Japan’s domestic travel recovery initiative, was used by 68.5 billion guest nights from the opening day of July 11 to the end of November, and a budget used for the initiative totaled about 406.3 billion JPY at least.

Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea have decided to introduce their first dynamic pricing system on March 20 2021, ranging from 8,200 JPY to 8,700 JPY for an adult one-day passport. The prices vary with seasons or day of week.

The Japanese government accepted a FY2021 budget draft of 40.9 billion JPY, 40% less than the FY2020 budget, for Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) that is focusing on new travel styles including Workcation and promotion of digital transformation for the tourism services as new policies in FY2021.

JTB Tourism Research & Consulting has calculated losses of 9.6 million travelers and 318.7 billion JPY in travel consumption due to the tentative suspension. Japanese domestic travelers during 2020-2021 New Year holiday period is expected to reduce by 73% to 7.9 million from 29.3 million a year ago.

Sales of 47 major travel companies reduced by 65.7% year on year to 155.6 billion JPY in total in October 2020. Domestic travel were down by 38.7% to 151 billion JPY, improving from from a 62.8% reduction in September, boosted by ‘Go To Travel' that has included Tokyo in October.

The number of Japanese overseas travelers was down 98.1% year on year to 30,700 in November 2020.No large increase was seen in November, despite ease of quarantine for Japanese business travelers after returning to Japan and start of pre-test program for Japanese travelers in Hawaii.