Jalan Research Center of Recruit Lifestyle recently conducted a survey on international visitors to Japan from Hong Kong Singapore, U.S., Australia and France. According to the results, the most selected lodging was mid-priced hotel (49.4%), followed by luxury hotel (33.0%) and ryokan (23.8%).
Interestingly, apartment or home like Airbnb (35%) was more popular than ryokan for travelers from Singapore, and budget hotel (30%) and B&B/pension/guest house (29.0%) were more popular than luxury hotel for travelers from Hong Kong. For luxury hotel, the ratio of U.S. travelers was higher than that of other countries’ travelers.
The table below shows lodgings selected by travelers from the five countries:
The most selected information source for lodging before arriving in Japan was lodging website (47.6%), followed by search engine like Google or Yahoo (47%), lodging booking site like Booking.com or Expedia (46%), airline website (43.6%) and travel company website (43.4%).
The trend varied with countries. For travelers from Hong Kong, search engine and lodging website were preferred with the ratio of 60% or higher, and SNS/ blog, TV program, newspaper/magazine and travel guidebook were also used more frequently than travelers from other four countries did. For travelers from Singapore, JNTO website and word-of-mouth site like TripAdvisor were frequently used as information sources.
The most impressive experience in traveling in Japan was ‘many tasty restaurants (49%),’ followed by ‘local hospitality (43%)’ and ‘many attractive restaurants (43%).’ The most disappointed experience was ‘none (32%),’ but language barriers against local people (19%) and staff of restaurants (19%) showed up.
The most expected service was ‘usage of public transportations (35.8%),’ followed by ‘Internet environment (28.6%),’ ‘comfort of public transportation (28%)’ and ‘usage of currency exchange, ATM or credit card (27.6%).’
The survey was conducted in the period from September 14 to 28 2016 to 500 travelers to Japan from the above five countries in the past year.
