News

Sales of 43 major travel companies in June 2024 were up 2.7% year on year to 291.7 billion JPY, but the monthly result was down 26.6% compared to the same month of 2019. Sales in overseas travel were still down 37.3% compared to June 2019.

According to the latest NTT Docomo survey, 80.1% of 15 to 79 years old Japanese people are proactive about getting loyalty points in daily shopping. 87.1% said that it is ideal for them to accumulate points without realizing and without any efforts.

The latest Hotels.con survey finds that 81% of Japanese respondents like process of selecting and booking a hotel, and Japanese travelers choose a booking hotel among 7.5 choices on the average.

According to the latest Booking.com survey on LGBTA+ travel in 27 countries and regions including Japan, 44% of Japanese LGBTQ+ travelers booked travel to a LGBTQ+-friendly destination in the last 12 months.

JAL has started offering original programs of ‘Disney +’ as an inflight entertainment. The new service has been available on all　international flights since July and on all domestic flights since August.

Euromonitor survey finds that Japan has the highest percentage of people who performed ‘solo travel.’ The percentage of people who answered "I often travel alone" in Japan was 19.2%, much higher than 7.2% globally.

Yahoo Data Solution revealed that the peak period of travel in this summer is July as a whole, while the peak period of solo travel is August. The top of the related keywords search is ‘solo travel, girls, recommendation.'

Japan Association of Travel Agents (JATA) Japan Outbound Tourism Council (JOTC) is building a joint promotion framework with Europe Travel Commission (ETC) to address recovery of traveling to Europe, including a variety of promotions in coming Tourism EXPO Japan.

JR EAST, Hoshino Resorts and LINE Yahoo talked about how they use generative AI at an annual conference ‘Google Cloud Next Tokyo ’24.' Tomoyuki Hirate, Google Cloud President Japan, said “AI is definitely shifting from the trial stage to the usage stage in the business world.”

JR East a Japanese railway operator., has started a pilot program ‘JR EAST Travel Concierge,’ to support travel planning for international visitors, using Google’s generative AI ‘Gemini’ and Google Cloud.

Foreigners’ guest nights in three major urban areas and in local areas was up 59.0% and 5.9% to 9.76 million guest nights and to 3.81 million guest nights respectively. The largest growth in comparison with May 2019 was seen in Ishikawa with 148.6% up.

EY Strategy and Consulting (EY Japan) has issued an insight report on over-tourism in Japan to introduce countermeasures taken in foreign countries and to reveal results of the survey on over-tourism.

Payn, an automatic cancellation fee collection system provider, has tied up with giftee, an e-gift platform, to send a digital gift to a customer who cancels a hotel or a restaurant.

ANA and JTB jointly develop a two-days tour traveling from Miyako, a remote island in Okinawa, to Memanbetsu in Hokkaido with a private jet ‘Falcon 2000 LXS’, targeting luxury travelers.

Spending in Japan by international travelers in the second quarter of 2024 increased by 68.6% to 2,1 trillion yen compared to 2019. The highest average was seen in France with 417,536 yen per traveler.

According to ‘Leisure White Paper 2024 (preliminary),’ the performance rate of ‘domestic travel’ rose from 42.8% last year to 48.7%, which was still lower than 54.3% in 2019 before the pandemic. The performance rate of ‘overseas travel’ was just 5.3%.

53.6% of all want direct mails from contents holders in the tourism sector, and 39.1% in the sports and entertainment sector, according to NTTCom Online Marketing Solutions' survey on ‘D2C (Direct to Consumer) .

Japan Tourism Agency has estimated that an economic impact boosted by international skiers and snowboarders was about 64.3 billion yen in 2023, recognizing that ski and snowboard are key tourism activities to increase local spending and extend stay days in local areas.

Raffles Tokyo with 130 rooms will open on the 36th to 48th floors of the main and terminal of the renovated World Trade Center in 2028. This will be the first Raffles hotel in Japan.

‘Prefecture ranking in tourism attractions,’ revealed as one of the domestic travel survey by Jalan Research Center, that the most-satisfied prefecture in 2023 was Kagoshima, followed by Ehime and Ishikawa.