ALL eyes are on Japan as its major cities enter a state of emergency, a couple of months before the Olympics. We catch up with co-founder of WiT Japan & North Asia, Kei Shibata, co-founder & CEO, LINE Travel jp & Trip101, for an update from Japan.
Q: What is the current situation re-domestic travel in your country?
We are still seeing quite limited recovery in domestic travel in Japan since the big cities like Tokyo had been in the state of emergency until last month and some big cities like Osaka are now getting into the fourth wave of virus spread driven by the new strains. Data from our LINE Travel jp shows that domestic travel demand is still far below 50% of pre-pandemic level.
Q: What is the outlook on vaccinations and how will those play a role in opening borders?
Unfortunately, vaccine rollout in Japan is running behind and we are not being able to be optimistic with this issue in the short run. We maintain our hope of picking up the speed towards the Tokyo Olympics. As we are able to see a strong recovery in the US and UK markets triggered by the successful vaccine rollout through our Trip101’s business performance, I am very positive that vaccinations should also play a tremendous role in Japan and other Asian markets as well going forward. Once that happens, it should first stimulate the domestic demand in large scale and then help open the borders for resuming both inbound and outbound travels.
Q: How is the industry viewing the Olympics? It was meant to be the biggest boost to inbound tourism but now???
We can’t deny our disappointment of losing this great opportunity to boost inbound tourism. Under the current fragile circumstances, now I am hoping that at least it will happen and bring some local spectators in.
Q: What 3 steps are you taking to ride through the rest of the year?
1. Survival
2. Prepare for the (tangible) domestic travel recovery
3. New product launch
Q: How different will the Japanese travel industry look after this?
Every sector is moving to online at an accelerated pace as a number of offline travel agency outlets are shutting down, contactless operations are becoming standard.
Q: Key challenge facing your country’s travel industry
• Vaccine rollout speed.
• Excess supply (given that the industry has added the capacity in tremendous scale for the Olympics and beyond).
Q: Key opportunity facing your country’s travel industry
New travel styles such as “workation” (working from vacation home) and “bleisure” (combining business trip and leisure trip) could potentially bring the travel demand up to the next level as working-from-home becomes not an unusual work format for many Japanese now.
• Featured image credit: Chinnapong/Getty Images
