JTB CEO Eijiro Yamakita talked about a business strategy in 2025 at a partner event ‘JTB Group New Year Partnership Meeting 2025,’ redefining its big picture of ‘Bringing People, Places and Possibilities Together.
“We will continue building connections and empathy between people and people, between people and local communities and between people and organizations in a sustainable way by co-creating values of local communities and generating organizations and flows of people and information with human power on a digital base,” Yamakita explained. “As AI is evolving rapidly, we have to rethink about values of people.”
Need to manage personalization and diversification
JTB has forecasted that Japanese domestic travelers will increase by 2.7% to 305 million, and Japanese outbound travelers by 8.5% to 14 million. Inbound travelers to Japan are expected to exceed 40 million.
In the domestic travel market, JTB will focus on sending travelers to Osaka Kansai EXPO 2025 in the first half of FY2025 and strengthen campaigns for Okinawa in the second half of FY2025, for Tohoku in the first half of FY2026 and for Kyushu in the second half of FY2026.
In the overseas travel market, JTB will launch a campaign for Europe, following the MOU with The European Travel Commission (ETC), in which both JTB and ETC work together for creation of sustainable tours and events to encourage Japanese people to travel to Europe.
In addition, JTB will open a new retail shop exclusively for overseas travel in Shinjuku this year as a place to select travel items freely.
Japanese overseas travelers has still remained around 70% of the 2019 level. “Conversely speaking, the market will grow from now on,” Yamakita said. “We see that the weak yen trend will continue for a while under the Trump administration, We have to rebuild tourism based on a new yen-dollar rate.”
Picking ‘Personalization,’ ‘Well-being,’ ‘Small group’ and ‘Borderless’ as four main trends in 2025, Yamakita said, “Personalized travel is advancing, and diversification and interests in health and how to live are higher than before. A travel group will be smaller to avoid over-tourism, The point is how we can manage the trends effectively.”
Yamakita said, "Strengthening power of regions and people with AI."
AI is a key, but power of human is required
JTB has been building digital CRM base. Registers in MyJTB, a loyalty program, reached 15 million in total, and My JTB registrations accounted for 87% of all bookings. The ratio of domestic travel bookings on its app was 13% of all online sales. Yamakita said, “The app still has a room to improve, but I believe we have consolidated a digital customer base.”
“AI allows us to get rid of language barriers and gives us a variety of possibilities from recommendations to matching in itinerary creation. A key is how we can use AI in the future,” he added.
In addition, Yamakita emphasized how important is power of human, saying, “Physical communication is absolutely needed even though languages are translated automatically. Power of human is required for empathy, hunch, trust and direction of surprises.”
To heighten values of human power, JTB pays attention to DEIB: ‘Diversity,’ ‘Equity,’ ‘Inclusion’ and ‘Belonging.’ Yamakita said, “Travel has the power to satisfy people, to develop society, and to enrich the earth. Without communication, humans cannot live rich lives. We will continue to promote ‘Bringing People, Places and Possibilities Together’ project on the global stage.”
