One, it will invest in building stronger brands and products for its flight and hotel meta-searches within Japan and two, it will expand its footprint to Asia. It’s set up a Singapore-based subsidiary to invest in travel start-ups in regional markets.

The deal to sell coneco.net, its shopping comparison site, to Yahoo Japan was finalized last month. Declining to disclose details of the acquisition, Shibata said it was good timing for VR to make an exit from the shopping business to focus on travel.

“The shopping business is getting into another stage. Consolidation has been taking place faster than in travel. If you look at the US, most of the shopping sites have been consolidated.

“Google is kicking butt in meta search shopping, Amazon and eBay are so strong in retail and in Japan, we think we are getting into this stage. Amazon, Rakuten and Google are capturing market share steadily and the only other player remaining is Yahoo Japan which is an auction player like eBay. What Yahoo wants to do is leverage its huge traffic in search to do more in shopping, and they need content.

“Google is getting very strongly into the shopping vertical so it’ll be interesting to see what it does in travel as well.”

With sights now firmly set on travel, Shibata said his priority was to invest in brand building in Japan, taking a leaf from the book of players such as Kayak and Trivago which have succeeded in building strong consumer brands. Google is coming in, OTAs are coming in, so what happens to meta-search? We need to build stronger brands.”

The company will be spending 2.5 times more in traditional TV advertising in Fukuoka, Hokkaido and now Osaka.

Travel.jp and Hotel.jpmeanwhile, are seeing up to well over 50% increase in traffic, helped greatly by the company’s investment in mobile 18 months ago. Last month, the two sites “attracted almost” eight million users.

“Mobile traffic has exceeded PC on some days,” said Shibata. “Our investment in mobile has paid off. The shift is frightening if you haven’t made the investment in mobile.”

Hotel.jp will also launch international products in the fourth quarter through partnerships with OTAs such as Agoda and Expedia. This will enable Japanese customers to search for hotels outside Japan. In the second phase, it will integrate hotel reviews and meta search to target inbound travellers into Japan. And potentially, VR may invest in a multi-lingual meta-search model in an Asian market.

While Hotel.jp works off user generated content, recently “Travel.jp” has invested in expert-generated content by engaging with bloggers. Thus far, it has more than 100 bloggers producing specialized content and the plan is to grow this pool to 1,000 syndicated contributors.

As Shibata sees it, there’s the content that’s produced by authorities such as Lonely Planet and then there’s user generated content such as in TripAdvisor. The component missing is “higher quality reviews written by bloggers”.

Layering this syndicated and curated social content on top of search will help users find the reviews most relevant to them.

While Facebook integration with TripAdvisor and Facebook social graph search are ways of trying to filter out reviews most relevant to users, Shibata believes this has limitations in that you get reviews only from friends when what you may want are reviews from influencers and other experts.

To further help users search for social content in travel better, Shibata has signed an agreement with German-based online reputation management company, TrustYou, to try integrating its data into its search.

“We are hoping that with their data, we will be able to surface detailed search and descriptions – such as “where is the best hotel to stay with your pets” or “which hotel has two swimming pools, one for kids and one for adults”.

“TrustYou is hoping to crack those questions by analyzing big data – it’san interesting approach – and it seems that   major metasearch sites like Trivago are also trying to do the same thing.”