News

Z Holdings with Yahoo Japan under its umbrella and LINE, the biggest communication app in Japan, completed the business integration of the two companies into new Z Holdings on March 1 2021 to become the biggest Internet service provider in Japan.

Mitsui Fudosan and Mitsui Fudosan Hotel Management will launch a subscription service for three hotel brands in Japan to choose a hotel or a room you like on a monthly basis.

Japanese IT solution company Almex launches a TV system for a hotel management to grasp how a guest uses room facilities with its sensing technology, making a guest smart phone remote controllers for TV, air conditioner, lights or even room order.

ANA restores domestic flights to 55% of the original plan between March 8 and 31 2021 probably after the state of emergency declaration is lifted on March 7, but only 19% of originally planned international flights by June this year.

JAL will reorganize its business structures into four divisions of Route Marketing, Passengers Sales and Marketing, Customer Experience and Mileage and Lifestyle Business divisions to promote digital transformation and to build a sustainable growth base for post-COVID-19.

JTB will reduce its capital from 2.3 billion JPY currently to 100 million JPY as of March 31 2021, downsizing to a small to mid-sized business on the corporate tax system to pay corporate tax at lower rate.

Domestic travel consumption by Japanese travelers was down 46.5% year on year to 2,694 billion JPY in the fourth quarter of 2020 (October to December 2020), and the yearly total accordingly decreased by 54.9% to 9,898 billion JPY. Travel expenditure was down 9.2% to 33,925 JPY a traveler a trip in 2020.

The awareness of ‘Clubhouse,’ a talked-about audio communication app, is 37% on average, but the rate rises to 47% among 20s. The ratio of ‘I want to use it’ is 14% among 20s, much higher than 5% overall, according to the Cross Marketing’s survey.

JTB Tourism Research & Consulting's survey shows that keys to choose accommodation is ‘thorough hygiene,' ‘dining a private room,' and ‘chartered bath,' all of which are to avoid close contact with others like staying home.

HOSHINOYA Taketomi Island in Okinawa stops serving a bottled water in a room for an environmental reason, desalinating seawater for self-sufficiency of drinking water.

JTB Tourism Research & Consulting Survey notably illustrates that Japanese female seniors were more willing to travel in the last three months of 2020 than before, although those people had been negative about traveling since COVID-19 broke out.

Sales of domestic travel of 47 major travel companies in Japan were down by 38% to 128.1 billion JPY, worsening from a 25.8% reduction in November 2020, due to tentative suspension of Go To Travel’ nationwide amid a re-increase in COVID-19 cases.

The top two websites in the travel and transport category were ‘jalan.net' and ‘Rakuten Travel’ in the same manner as a year ago. TripAdvisor, JR East and Yahoo! Travel were among top five, but all of them reduced visitors by around 20% compared to a year ago amid the pandemic.

Klook survey finds that the ratio of people who are unsatisfied with not traveling overseas currently was 36% in Japan, which was lower than 55% on average in APAC.

According to Tokyo Shoko Research (TSR), bankruptcies of travel companies in Japan were just two in January 2021, fewer bankruptcies than a year ago for three months in row, probably because of effective financial supports by the government and banks amid the pandemic.

KNT-CT Holdings announced that it had liabilities exceeding it’s assets by 3.5 billion JPY as of the end of December 2020, sufferring a large scale of cancellations since the the third wave of COVID-19 hit Japan beginning in November.

The total number of Japanese guest nights was down 24.4% year on year to 28.7 million, dropping from a 16.1% reduction in November 2020 obviously because the Japanese domestic travel recovery program ‘Go To Travel’ has been suspended nationwide.

Carstay, a Japanese start-up offering sharing services of travel trailers, has launched ‘Mobile Office’ project to rent a travel trailer as a remote-working space, expecting to meet new needs amid the pandemic.

JTB is accelerating digital-based human-touch services in Tourism, Area Solution and Business Solution fields, shifting its selling channels from retailers or call centers to smart devices-oriented Online Mergers with Offline amid its digital transformation efforts.

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo announced launch of a new service apartment business, for which 99 rooms on the third floor have been renovated, expecting to meet new needs, such as the second working space for corporate executives, business continuity plan (BCP) or the second house for a wealthy class.