TokyoTomo Travel Guide

All Nippon Airways (NH) and JTB Corp. will jointly operate charter flights between Haneda and Honolulu from July 16 to August 31 this year in a drive to stimulate overseas travel demand from Haneda including travel to Hawaii during the summer holidays. With flights scheduled to depart from Tokyo Haneda late in the evening and return home early in the morning, ANA and JTB will introduce a new type of travel in connection with the internationalization of Haneda Airport, providing the best connecting local flights to and from Haneda and also featuring special package tours such as a Tokyo city tour, making good use of time before departure from Haneda.

Aircraft to be put into service is Boeing B777-200ER configured with 70 Business, 36 Premier Economy and 117 Economy class seats totaling 223. All 11 charter flights planned will be a seven-day package tour. ANA Sales and JTB World Vacations will sell a total of 2,500 seats, 50% of which is to be sold through the respective sales channel. JTB World Vacations will put the package tour on the market under a brand name of “LOOK JTB.” One of the tours, for instance, will be available from 201,000 yen per adult sharing a double room at Sheraton Waikiki Resort.

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.

JTB World Vacations, Inc. (JTBWV) is going to broadly revamp the product lineup of LOOK JTB in the fiscal year 2010 for the first time in 16 years in a bid to offer enhanced quality of overseas package tours. Fumiyuki Kitajima, CEO of JTBWV, made a remark at the product presentation on January 13 as follows: “We are hard put in business now as our performance for the fiscal 2009 is about to see a negative growth for three years running for the first time since the liberalization of overseas travel in 1964. However, we know an opportunity often presents itself after a pinch, so this should be a good chance to overhaul our product lineup.” He then unveiled the company policy that JTBWV should break away from the “negative spiral” pertaining to overseas travel business, such as price war, tarnished product quality, irrational demand on suppliers, and excessive strain on tour escorts and guides.

In pursuit of the new product lines, the company makes it a point to serve to the consumers’ interest, setting the motto “Travel to be endorsed with satisfaction” as its tag line. It set criteria for product standardization, and those products that meet them were included in LOOK JTB and those that do not were classified as off-brand products. The off-brand products are to be marketed as strategic, pinpointed, and price-conscious tours for the purpose of stimulating demand for off-peak periods or for late-coming bookings, exploring specific markets, and meeting suppliers’ promotional needs. The merchandizing staff had studied 180,000 responses from the customers, 8,000 reports from the tour escorts, and 1,500 comments from the retailers to find out what improvements should be made in an effort to “remove every single piece of complaints of customers to fulfill their requirements.”

The points to have been improved include: (1) to confirm at the time of booking the carrier’s name and flight numbers for departure from and arrival at Japan, allowing no tours to be released without specifying airlines, (2) to seat every accompanying traveler next to each other with no extra charge on departing and returning flights, (3) to use only A and B grade hotels in the JTBWV’s rating, and assign rooms with bathtub in principle, (4) to eliminate shopping stopovers, unless reasonably necessary from the viewpoint of participants, except those combined with a restroom break during the course of sightseeing or long-distance transfer. Moreover, the agency redressed arrival transfer from the airport that makes too many stops at guests’ hotels on the way, and poor quality of meals.

All these improvements will not be in place on some tours by the end of the fiscal year 2010, but Kitajima assured that they will be dealt with and be complete in 2011.

As a way of verifying JTBWV’s commitment to abide by the tour conditions expressed in the itinerary, it has raised compensation money to be paid in the event of any discrepancies in the travel arrangements. In case there occurs an alteration in the means of transportation or its operators after departure from Japan, for instance, the company now reimburses 10 percent of the tour price instead of 2 percent as it used to. Kitajima comments on this, “Such payment costs us a lot, but we decided to take a risk for fulfilling our engagement.”

It was back in May 2008 that JTBWV set out to review the tour contents for all-out reform, and its task force had thorough discussion for 20 months ever since while working laboriously with suppliers and tour operators. Take a single instance of guaranteeing to put peer passengers abreast in the cabin, for example. JTBWV had reportedly to talk to and get assurance from individual airlines serving Japan on relevant routes incorporated into the itineraries.

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.