Onsen ryokan business wants to target inbound and expand services beyond travel for Japanese seniors
Fresh out of law school, Wakako Tokuda travelled the world looking for love and a potential husband in 52 countries across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America. During those eight months, she would ask any man she found attractive, “Are you my friend?”
By the time she got to Europe she said she had spoken to more than 100 men. “Of the men I met, two made it to the short list,” she recalled in an interview with a local media. “The British man I met in Latvia later visited me in Japan, but he returned home after seeing me devote so much of my time to work. The Bedouin I met in Jordan who was as handsome as the singer Tomoya Nagase turned me down with a pun: ‘You can bed a Bedouin only in the desert.’”
Wakako Tokuda, an onsen sommelier: Targeting senior Japanese travellers and taking Yuko Yuko international.
Putting that past behind her – Wakako finally found love back home in Japan with a work colleague – she’s now putting all that life experience, plus her considerable business track record, into taking Yuko Yuko Holdings to the next level of growth.
She wants to take the primarily domestic booking business for onsen ryokans internationally by targeting inbound travellers, and she wants to expand to services beyond travel for its target market of senior consumers.
An onsen sommelier herself, Wakako joined Yuko Yuko in 2020 but could really only be active from June 2021 after the easing of pandemic restrictions. Yuko Yuko is a hybrid booking business for onsen ryokans across Japan. It publishes a magazine “Yuko Yuko” (one million copies distributed every two months) and operates the website, yukoyuko.net, and mobile app.
One of the onsen ryokan featured in yukoyuko.net
Its key differentiator is targeting senior consumers with weekday accommodation deals. It reported TTV of more than JPY25b (pre-pandemic) and in terms of financials, the company had a revenue of approximately JPY5b and EBITDA of approximately JPY1b in FY3/23. It reports 8.5m members and 2.3 million room nights annually.
Yuko Yuko has a nation-wide network of partnerships with over 3,000 Onsen Ryokans across Japan and Wakako said it has “a unique customer base of active seniors who have the time, energy, and spending power to travel on weekdays”.
Yuko Yuko was founded in January 2000, had a business integration with Recruit in 2006 and in August 2016, became independent from Recruit. In November 2023, Unison Capital took a majority stake in the company and Wakako has been charged with leading growth for the company in a very changed travel market.
“We operate using both online and offline channels,” she said. “Our magazine is highly popular and liked by our customers and we have unique customers that other travel agencies struggle to acquire which is characterised by “seniors independent travel” and “weekday x vacation”.”
Up to 81% percent of its customers are over 50 years old and 90% of them travel on weekdays. “Our customers help fill the low weekday troughs for ryokans and help even out the seasonality,” she said.
A robust call centre is at the core of its business. Its 250 booths handle over 2,500 cases daily. “We strive to offer the sense of security offered by TTAs (traditional travel agents )with the functionality of OTAs (online travel agents),” said Wakako.
Wakako Tokuda (left) was at WiT Africa to learn about the African travel market, as part of her mission to globalise Yuko Yuko Holdings. Seen with Yeoh Siew Hoon, founder, WiT and Stephan Ekbergh, CEO, Travelstart.
In this next phase of growth, Yuko Yuko is targeting inbound business through collaboration with overseas partners and making the website multi-lingual. It also wants to transform from an advertising agency targeting senior consumers to a platform that helps senior citizens pursue self-fulfilment and it is launching a staffing service by leveraging close relationships with accommodation facilities.
“We want to contribute to solve local issues by eliminating labour shortages at accommodation facilities,” she said.
Considering her looking-for-love travel experience, Wakako is certainly no stranger to new adventures. When she returned to Japan, she worked for Goldman Sachs for a spell, and later at a private equity firm engaged in the environmental and energy sectors.
In 2012, she was sent by her company to work with broadcaster CROSS FM in Fukuoka and was appointed president and CEO of the station in 2013, while still in her 20s.
“It was all men,” she recalled, “and they wondered what I was doing there. It wasn’t easy.”
Her mission was to restructure the business so that it was powered completely by renewable energy. She resigned in June 2015, to take on the next adventure – rebuilding a company called Homemade Cooking, which runs cooking classes throughout Japan.
Today, she’s focused on cooking up the next adventure for Yuko Yuko Holdings. “We are excited by the various growth opportunities including further growth of the online business, capturing inbound tourists, and addressing the needs of the growing senior market beyond the travel business.”
