Japan Tourism Agency reported that travel transactions of 49 major travel agents totaled 425.6 billion JPY (+2.5%) in January 2016. The monthly total consisted of 127 billion JPY for outbound travel (-8.1%), 10.1 billion JPY for inbound travel (+40.5%) and 288.4 billion JPY (+6.9%).
All of the top five travel agents (JTB, H.I.S., Hankyu, KNT-CT and NTA) resulted in year-on-year reductions of outbound travel transactions, and only JTB and H.I.S. had maintained 20 billion JPY or more since November 2015.
Among the top five travel agents for inbound travel transactions, H.I.S. moved up to 2nd for the first time in the past six months, increasing the transactions by 55.9%. Rakuten Travel maintained 5th with the monthly growth of 92.8%.
In the travel in Japan market, Rakuten Travel (2nd) achieved double-digit monthly growths for 10 months in a row since April 2015.
Transactions of package tour brand products totaled 106.2 billion JPY in January 2016 (-2.9%) with 2,584,838 customers in total (-1.3%), which comprised 428 million JPY (+11.0%) with 25,105 customers (+49.0%) for inbound travel, 40.6 billion JPY (-11.5%) with 237,113 customers (-5.2%) for outbound travel and 65.1 billion JPY (+3.2%) with 2,322,620 customers (-1.3%) for travel in Japan.
According to the hearings to travel agents, travelers from East Asia and Southeast Asia continued growing in the inbound travel market, boosted by an increase in LCC flights. In the travel in Japan market, new attractions in Universal Studio Japan encouraged travelers to go to Kansai, and popularity of travel to Hokuriku was still high. In the outbound travel market, weak yen continued discouraging Japanese travelers to go abroad for leisure particularly to Europe.
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