News

To raise travelers' confidences at an airport, JAL has introduced a contactless self-checkin kiosk at Haneda Airport as a trial in the beginning. You can check in with a finger in the air 3 cm off the display.

‘Leisure White Paper 2020' shows that domestic travel was the most popular leisure activity among Japanese people for nine years in a row, and a notable trend in 2019 was an increase in subscription service users even before COVID-19.

Airbnb will join the Japanese government’s leading domestic travel campaign ‘Go To Travel’ as a home sharing platform, offering discounted listings in the middle of this coming October.

Okinawa Convention & Visitors Bureau (OCVB) has revised downward its annual visitor forecast for 2020 from originally 3.91 million (announced on July 29) to 3.61 million mainly because of more group travel cancelations than expected. In the worse case, Okinawa will lose 511 billion JPY in tourism spending.

Users of the Japanese government’s domestic travel recovery campaign ‘Go To Travel’ reached about 4.2 million guest nights in total for the first month. Registrations in the campaign accounted for 49% of all accommodation providers and 58% of all travel service providers.

Japan is the most preferred destination to visit after COVID-19 ends among Asian travelers, according to the joint survey by DBJ and JTBF. They point out that ‘traditional cleanness’ of Japan will be one of the keys to attract international travelers again.

ANA and JAL continued suffering low domestic passenger demand during the mid-August summer holiday period because of re-spread of COVID-19 , resulting in the load factor of 30% range.

Japanese overseas travelers was down 98.8% year on year to 20,300 in July 2020, but the monthly result doubled from 10,666 in June 2020.

JNTO reported international visitors to Japan was down 99.9% year on year to 3,800 in July 2020, and the YOY reduction was seen for ten months in a row, and the almost zero results have been seen since April.

JTB offers VR-based ‘Virtual School Trip 360’ combining a 360-degree image tour with realtime communication with local people in order to give a school trip opportunity to schools suspending their trips amid COVID-19.

According to the Expedia’s survey on paid holiday in 19 countries and regions, Japan is the world’s top country acquiring ‘multiple short paid holidays' with the ratio of 51%, much higher than 34% in US (2nd). More than half of Japanese also wish paid holidays every month.

The JTB Report 2020, analyzing the outbound travel market of Japan in 2019, illustrates major reasons for the record-breaking result, and some of the trends are likely to continue even after COVID-19 ends.

Economic impact of the Rugby World Cup Japan 2019 reached 646.4 billion ($6.1 billion) JPY in total. Local consumption by spectators amounted to 388.9 billion JPY ($3.6 billion), out of which consumption by international spectators amounted to 348.2 billion JPY ($3.3 billion).

Booking.com and Agoda join 'Go To Travel' campaign, the Japanese government's leading domestic travel recovery campaign. After each of partner accommodations or vacation rentals register themselves in the campaign, the OTA will sell them on its platform.

In preparation for restart of overseas business travel, HIS has launched a support travel plan for travelers to Bangkok, offering a package of the COVID-19-related solutions including test opportunity, self-quarantine hotel and airport transfer.

Travel Voice LIVE in late July welcomed TripAdvisor Japan leader Tomoe Makino to discuss an insight into the future inbound travel market, based on the consumer survey in six countries including Japan.

OYO Japan is launched, integrated OYO LIFE and OYO Hotels into 'One OYO Japan' brand, to raise its awareness in the Japanese market.

JAL ended the 1st quarter of FY2020 ended Kune 30 2020 with net loss of 93.7 billion JPY due to unprecedented cancellations and reductions of flights amid the COVID-19 crisis, expecting passenger revenue will reduce by 55% to 65% for the full fiscal year.

Presidents of NTA, JTB and KNT-CT talked about the future travel at JATA Online Travel Mart 2020 Forum, expecting that overseas travel will be resumed as soon as possible. They discussed demand decentralization, digitalization, workcation and so forth.

Japanese overnight travel performance rate on its travel booking site jalan.net dropped to the lowest ever of 53.6% in FY2019 ending March 31 2020, largely affected by COVID-19 in March 2020. Overnight travel expenses were down 6.1%.