TokyoTomo Travel Guide

Japanese foreign ministry has announced it will further ease tourist visa restrictions for individual Chinese travelers from September 1 onwards as well as extend the duration of stay permitted, from 15 days to a maximum of 30 days, in a bid to revive tourism. The government currently only issues visas to individual Chinese travelers after assessing their occupation and income levels. After the new policy is implemented, financial restrictions will be abolished.

A year after immigration control first introduced the individual tourist visa on July1, 2010, which previously Chinese travelers could only visit Japan by signing up a group tour with a government appointed travel agency, the number of Chinese travelers have been increasing rapidly. In year 2009 a total of 7688 visas were issued and in year 2010 the number increased many folds with more than 50,000 visas being issued.

It is hoping that these moves will help the country tap into the world’s fastest growing travel market and attract visitors to return after the Fukushima nuclear crisis, which was triggered by the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in March this year, causing a slowdown in the economy.

The Qantas Group, Japan Airlines Co., Ltd (JAL) and Mitsubishi Corporation announced today the launch of Jetstar Japan – a new domestic airline that will bring more low airfares to customers in Japan. The Qantas Group, JAL and Mitsubishi Corporation will each hold 1/3 share in the new company (voting-rights-basis). Jetstar Japan will commence domestic operations by the end of 2012 and expects to fly from Tokyo (Narita) and Osaka (Kansai International), with other destinations under consideration including Sapporo, Fukuoka, and Okinawa.

Jetstar Japan also plans to ultimately offer short haul international services to key Asian cities making travel more accessible and appealing to millions more people. The airline will launch with an initial fleet of three new Airbus A320 aircraft, configured for 180 customers in a single class, growing to 24 aircraft within its first few years. Total capitalization commitment for the new airline is up to ¥12 billion.

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Some time has passed since I wrote the last article in this column. I initially started this series of reports with a motive to update our overseas readers working for travel trade with the latest information about the Japanese travel market after the 3.11 earthquake. Since the new developments relating to the quake aftermaths faded into the background, it became a bit difficult to round up fresh news.

Clearly, the restoration processes of the tsunami-stricken Tohoku area have just begun, and travel businesses having suffered physical damages and losses there do not seem to have found any way out yet. Moreover, secondary damages like harmful rumors and consumers’ self-restraint keep ailing them.

However, when we go through the travel news posted last week in our Daily Travel Vision, many of the news items are found to carry good news, even if we discount the trade journal’s common nature to spotlight the upside of what is going on in the industry. As a matter of fact, it was not easy to find bright spots in March and April.

Our record shows the most accessed article last week was an account of Alitalia’s strategy on the Japan route which says the airlines is going to increase one flight weekly for the Narita/Rome portion in July and August and another additional flight in September. It is too soon to predict what our summer travel market will look like and what outcome these additional flights will bring about, but the news is no doubt an encouraging one. We hope Alitalia would successfully fill up those additional flights as well as the existing ones.

Talking of flight capacity, I made a travel plan to Seoul personally the other day and tried to book on a flight, but had to give up the plan as the only available seats were in business class costing me 100,000 yen. It is true my reservation was made in too short a notice on busy weekend flights, yet I was taken aback by the unexpected high occupancy, knowing a number of flights serving the portion between Tokyo and Seoul. It might have happened that I ran into some event in Seoul featuring young Korean film stars very popular in Japan, but at any rate it was a sort of positive surprise.

In the last week’s coverage, Japan Airlines was reported to be going to put a larger aircraft into service between Chubu (Nagoya) and Honolulu during the summer vacation period. Additionally, Nippon Travel Agency (NTA) was reported to have made good progress in the sales of charter-operated package tours. Of five charter flights scheduled to depart from East Japan in July, NTA sold out almost all the seats, with only several seats left unsold on the flight departing at the end of the month, according to the agency.

The last week’s Daily Travel Vision also revealed that travel agencies had scrambled to sell overseas package tours originating from Sendai airport as the airport becomes operational for international scheduled flights on July 25 and for charter flights at the end of June. Just look at the footage of the airport being swept by the massive tsunami with Google search engine by entering Sendai airport tsunami. The disaster was real and it engulfed many of the inhabitants in the region only a few months ago, but incredibly overseas travelers are soon departing from the same airport!

What would weigh most, then, on people’s motivation for going abroad hereafter? I would say it is the issue of airline’s fuel surcharge. The surcharge amounts to as much as 50,000 yen in case of a long-haul round trip. A phrase goes: “value for money”, but what compensation do consumers get by this 50,000 yen? It is quite illogical that, even with the same airlines, the surcharge levied in Japan is sometimes much higher than that of the other end of the route. On what ground do they persuade us about this discrepancy?

We welcome the decision made by Jetstar Airways to maintain the current level of oil surcharge for the July-September period, which was also reported in our news release of last week. If Jetstar could gain a larger share of the market with this maneuver, other competing airlines that set their surcharge at much higher levels might follow suit. Travel agencies or travel market might as well support Jetstar in rapport with its applaudable attitude.

By YUICHI MATSUMOTO, Editor in chief

Source: Travel Vision

Travel Vision Inc. provides information on the travel industry in Japan via "Daily Travel Vision", a Japanese-language e-mail newsletter, and the "Travel Vision" website. There are nearly 110,000 people working in the Japanese travel industry, and Travel Vision is proud to be bringing travel news to more than 30,000 people through Daily Travel Vision.