News

HIS launches a new service for group travel, working together with Hawaii Tourism Authority and Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, offering ‘Malama Hawaii’ program on SDGs or regenerative tourism.

185 famous restaurants in Kyoto City offer respective winter-limited menus with their transparent price ranges espeically for inbound travelers.

The ratio of Japanese people who prefer to be alone was 56.3% in 2023, 12.8 higher points than 1993. The ratio of those who prefer to be alone rose across all generations.

Taxi app ‘GO’ provider is starting support services to taxi companies that are planning to start a ride-share service, developing an app for ride-share drivers and a management system for operators and local governments.

Japan Association of Travel Agents (JATA) is focusing on revival of outbound travel, regarding several anniversary events as good opportunities, and has an idea to support tourism in Hokuriku area that has catastrophically damaged by Noto Peninsula Earthquake.

Total number of guest nights in November 2023 (provisionally) was up 16.9% year on year to 53.6 million, which were up 7.9% compared to the same month of 2019. The share of foreigners’ guest nights was 22.8% of the total in October.

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism decided not to accept an IR (Integrated Resort) plan applied by Nagasaki Prefecture and KYUSHU Resorts Japan mainly because of the certainty of fund rising.

ZIP AIR, a JAL Group hybrid airline, will begin serving three flights a week between Narita and Vancouver on March 13 2024. One-way airfares are from 101,325 JPY for ZIP Full-Flat Value.

Tokyo Metro and YAMAHA will begin testing a new multi-language service ‘Visualized Announcement’ transcribing voice announcements in a station on a smartphone.

BRIDGE MULTILINGUAL SOLUTIONS has provided ‘free telephone interpretation service’ for foreigners living in Japan who have devastated by Noto Peninsula earthquake.

JTB has forecasted that the number of Japanese travelers in 2024 are expected to reach 287.5 million, and the number of inbound travelers will reach the most-ever 33.1 million, 31.3% more than a year ago or 3.8% more than 2019.

The number of Japanese overseas travelers was down 37.5% to 1,027,100 in November 2023 compared to the same month of 2019.

The number of international visitors in Japan in November 2023 reached 2,440,800, close to 2,441,274 in November 2019, totaling 22.3 million for the first 11 months of 2023.

The Japanese government has decided to approve ride-sharing service partially in April 2024. Firstly, taxi operators can be a ride-sharing operators in particular local areas suffering shortage of taxies.

In this coming New Year holiday period (December 28 2023 to January 3 2024), ANA has received 1.9 times more bookings for Hawaii than a year ago, and JAL has increased bookings for Europe by 34%.

According to NAVITIME Japan, a Japan’s leading navigation app, the most-searched tourist spot in 2023 was ‘Universal Studio Japan.' For foreigners, the top was ‘Fushimi Inari Taisha' in Kyoto.

Sales of 43 major travel companies in October 2023 were down 22.9% to 347 billion JPY compared to the same month of 2019. As sales of both domestic and overseas package tours were largely down, a trend to shift from group travel to FIT seemed to be strong.

ANA NEO, an ANA Group company for digital solution, has launched a virtual trip platform app ‘ANA GranWhale,’ where a user as an avatar can enjoy virtual travel space ‘V-TRIP’ and a virtual shopping space ‘Sky Mall.’

The ratio of respondents who plan to travel overseas within a year was 40%, higher than 28% in the previous survey a year ago, according to the Sony Bank survey. The top concern was ‘exchange rate’ at 72%.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China said that visa wavier for 6 countries has been working well, for the first three days, about 7,000 out of all travelers of about 18,000 from those countries entered China without visas.