CEO Kei Shibata said the continuous uptrend of traffic for Travel.jp (and meta search in general) compensated for the dip of demand caused by the earthquake and tsunami. “We assume more users were using meta search to find a better deal at the last minute.”

He said that revenues were up by 12.5% “in spite of the severe downturn in March and the sluggish demand still affecting the domestic travel market”.

“With the new search system in place, we improved the quality of our traffic for OTAs which are enjoying better conversion ratios now and this enabled us to charge higher for our CPC rate.”

The company has also launched two new services – an iPhone app for Hotel.jp, the first app of its kind in Japan that aggregates all hotel reviews and ratings by major hotel sites including Rakuten Travel, Jalan, Ikyu, JTB and TripAdvisor and combines that with its own user generated photos of hotels and ratings. Shibata said Hotel.jp has the largest selection of local hotels at 28,340.

Its new flight search feature is also the first “realtime meta search” for all domestic flights in Japan offering a unique interface that allows users to visually see/compare the prices and flight schedules at once.

Explained Shibata, “Some meta search engines like Kayak or Wego also provide real time search service for Japanese domestic flights but the fares are far from competitive (because local fares are not published in GDS) and the user interfaces are completely different.”