Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) announced that the sales of the 50 major Japanese travel agents amounted to 421.8 billion JPY in February 2018 (+3.2%), which consisted of 166.9 billion JPY for the outbound travel business (+5.3%), 16.3 billion JPY for the inbound travel business (+11.6%) and 238.5 billion JPY for the domestic travel business (+1.3%).
The graphs below show the outbound travel business results of the top five travel agents (25 JTB group companies, six H.I.S. group companies, three Hankyu Travel group companies, 11 KNT-CT group companies, NTA). Among them, JTB and KNT-CT especially did better business with a year-on-year growth of around 10%.
The graphs below show the inbound travel business results of the top five travel agents (25 JTB group companies, six H.I.S. group companies, NTA, 11 KNT-CT group companies, Rakuten) for the past year. H.I.S. had kept 2nd with a year-on-year growth of 30% since December 2017.
The graphs below show the domestic travel business results of the top five travel agents (25 JTB group companies, Rakuten, 11 KNT-CT group companies, NTA, ANA Sales) for the past year. Rakuten resulted in increasing sales by more than 10% year on year.
The sales of package tour brand products totaled 105.2 billion JPY (+1.8%) with 2,840,928 customers (-3.1%) in February 2018. The breakdown was 32.9 billion JPY (+7.9%) with 181,301 customers (-4.2%) for the outbound travel business, 471 million JPY (-6.0%) with 38,590 customers (+27.1%) for the inbound travel business and 71.9 billion JPY (-0.7%) with 2,621,037 customers (-3.3%) for the domestic travel business.
According to hearings from the travel companies, the outbound travel market was particularly boosted by high demands for Europe and Hawaii and also special demand for the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. The inbound travel market was particularly vitalized by increases in visitors from Greater China during the Chinese New Year period. For domestic travel, the market was overall damaged by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan side, but package tours for Hokkaido increased.
