Japan Tourism Agency reported that travel transactions of 49 major travel agents totaled 713.2 billion JPY (unchanged from a year ago) in August 2015. The monthly total consisted of 218.9 billion JPY for outbound travel (-13.6%), 13.6 billion JPY for inbound travel (+68.4%) and 480.7 billion JPY (+6.4%).

All of the top five travel agents (JTB, H.I.S., Hankyu, KNT-CT and NTA) resulted in year-on-year reductions for outbound travel as follows:

In the inbound travel market, Rukuten doubled monthly transactions, and NTA ranked 2nd again. All of the top five travel agents (JTB, NTA, H.I.S., KNT-CT and Rakuten) resulted in year-on-year growths as follows:

In the travel in Japan market, JTB group was still ahead of other four agents with monthly transactions of 120 billion JPY (+7.7%), and Rukuten increased monthly transactions by 17.1%. On the contrary, Hankyu reduced transactions for four months in a row.

Transactions of package tour brand products totaled 215.9 billion JPY in August 2015 (-7.4%) with 4,565,221 customers in total (-4.5%), which comprised 459 million JPY (+52.9%) with 28,999 customers (+69.9%) for inbound travel, 80 billion JPY (-19.3%) with 327,136 customers (-20.8%) for outbound travel and 135.5 billion JPY (+1.4%) with 4,209,086 customers (-3.2%) 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 for a main reason of ease of visa rules. In the travel in Japan market, popularity of travel to Kansai and Hokuriku was still high. In the outbound travel market, demand seemed to shift from the summer vacation period in August to the long holiday Silver Week in September.