Travel Sectors

JAL’s subsidiary LCC ZIP AIR TOKYO will start serving two flight a week between Narita and Seoul on October 16 2020, four months later than the original plan, following restart of business travel between Japan and South Korea.

Air Asia Japan will withdraw from all of its services in Japan on December 5 2020, suspending all of its flights since April amid COVID-19. It has judged the LCC business in Japan will no longer survive.

HIS suffered from large decreases in revenue and profits in the third quarter of FY2020 (November 1 2019 to July 31 2020), as the main travel business decreased operating revenue by 32.5% to 3346 billion JPY and fell into operating loss of 12 billion JPY from operating profit of 8.2 billion JPY a year ago.

The budgetary request of Japan Tourism Agency for FY2021 starting April 1 2021 amounts to 16.8 billion JPY (about $159 million), and another budgets for DX and Workcation promotion will be considered later, depending on the COVID-19 situation.

HIS, one the largest Japanese travel agents, will raise 22.6 billion JPY (about $214 million) through the third-party allocation of shares in order to accelerate new hotel developments and IT system developments.

Japanese LCC Peach Aviation introduced a Workcation system for its employees, as one of trials to develop Workcation products for individual travelers or companies in the future.

HIS has started selling ‘LIVING TRAVEL’ to meet consumers’ needs of overseas Workcation in Honolulu, Bali, Bangkok, Cairns and Amsterdam departing from Japan after November 2020.

Japanese pioneer travel magazine AB-ROAD will terminate on March 31 2021. The operator Recruit Lifestyle explains that the termination results from recent changes of customers’ needs and business environment.

This year’s Tourism EXPO Japan in Okinawa will be held for four days between October 29 and November 1 2020, organizing both in live and online for business meetings and international conferences amid COVID-19. Next year it will go to Osaka again.

Local bus and tour operator in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture launches a new package product incorporating PCR testing in tie-ups with a local clinic to ensure safer travel and confidence in traveling.

KNT-CT has started selling ‘’E’Vacation,’ an innovative product using electric vehicle (EV) in cooperation with Nissan in Kanagawa and Shizuoka, taking advantage of the Nissan’s car sharing service ‘NISSAN e-share mobi.’

Sales of 48 major travel companies unprecedentedly reduced by 87.4% year on year to 52.2 billion JPY in total in July 2020, but the monthly reduction rate, however, improved from 97.6% in May and 92.9% in June.

JTB develops a new product to tour in English in Japan with an authorized interpreter guide, targeting students who have lost international studies or senior people who want to learn English in travel, for example.

HIS continued struggling for a survive from the pandemic crisis, as it considerably reduced transaction volume by 97% year on year to 1,150 million JPY in July 2020.

To raise travelers' confidences at an airport, JAL has introduced a contactless self-checkin kiosk at Haneda Airport as a trial in the beginning. You can check in with a finger in the air 3 cm off the display.

Okinawa Convention & Visitors Bureau (OCVB) has revised downward its annual visitor forecast for 2020 from originally 3.91 million (announced on July 29) to 3.61 million mainly because of more group travel cancelations than expected. In the worse case, Okinawa will lose 511 billion JPY in tourism spending.

ANA and JAL continued suffering low domestic passenger demand during the mid-August summer holiday period because of re-spread of COVID-19 , resulting in the load factor of 30% range.

JTB offers VR-based ‘Virtual School Trip 360’ combining a 360-degree image tour with realtime communication with local people in order to give a school trip opportunity to schools suspending their trips amid COVID-19.

The JTB Report 2020, analyzing the outbound travel market of Japan in 2019, illustrates major reasons for the record-breaking result, and some of the trends are likely to continue even after COVID-19 ends.

In preparation for restart of overseas business travel, HIS has launched a support travel plan for travelers to Bangkok, offering a package of the COVID-19-related solutions including test opportunity, self-quarantine hotel and airport transfer.