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The recently-passed Golden Week is anticipated to be a healthy one for both domestic and outbound travel.
Inbound is slowly picking up. Chinese travellers are returning as are visitors from Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong.
“However, there’s no doubt the industry has been damaged and it will take a while to fully recover,” said Kei.
There’s great anticipation in Japan as to what low cost airlines will do to revive outbound travel.
Australia’s Tropical North Queensland and Sunshine Coast (pictured above) are certainly expecting a revival in Japanese tourism with the launch of Jetstar flights from Japan.
Rob Giason, CEO of Tropical North Queensland, said the new air routes had given Cairns the ability to chase business again. “There is a revival, driven by aviation. The low cost model will help us.”
Australia’s Northern Territory is also expecting a pick-up in Japanese traffic to Darwin following the investment of an oil and gas project by Japanese interests in the area.
“It’s the hottest topic now,” said Shibata. “Peach has started flying, Jetstar will start in July and AirAsia in October.”
He said that Travel.jp was still trying to figure out how to bring low cost inventory into their model. “We haven’t done a lot of business with Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways – they like having control.
“But we are seeing positive responses from Jetstar – they know the Japanese market is different from Australia where travel agents have more power and consumer behaviour is different. They want to leverage different marketing channels such as ours.”
As for expansion beyond Japan, Shibata said his priority was first to dig deep into the Japanese market. “The same is true for Qunar and Yatra. Unless you can be successful in a single market, you don’t want to go to different markets.
“Of course we will continue to look at opportunities such as Indonesia. We don’t want to get into a situation where we do lots of local language sites and see what happens – that’s not efficient.”
He sees tremendous opportunity for meta search in Asia. “Meta search only works if there are a few great OTAs around and this market is just evolving in the region.”
Low cost airlines will be a key topic of discussion at WIT Japan on May 25 in Tokyo. Scheduled to speak at the Executive Forum is Peter Harbison, executive chairman of the Centre for Aviation, Sydney.
