Japan Travel Trade Weekly News
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Japanese travel and tourism industries.
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KNT Plans to Handle 1.03 Million Outbound Customers in 2008, Up 4%, Focusing on Five Growth Fields
Mid-February, 2008
Kinki Nippon Tourist (KNT) set a target of 1.03 million customers
in the overseas travel business for 2008, up 4 percent from last
year. Concerning the number of package tour customers handled during
2007, it saw an increase of 5 percent on Mate and a decrease of 3
percent on Holiday, and North America as destination dropped by 30
percent and Europe sank by 20 percent.
The policy for this year, after reorganization of business
structure, is to make better matching of buying and product planning,
and better coordination of Holiday and group travel in sales, so that
the purchased travel components are fully used.
Kenji Sugii, executive officer and general manager for Overseas
Travel Department at KNT, says, "We cannot expect sizable market
expansion in 2008. It is important, therefore, to select travel
components with care and use them up effectively. In view of
timeline, it would be nice if we could have a peak of demand sometime
near the Beijing Olympic Games or near the Lower House election if it
ever happens."
He enumerates five fields as the promising segments for growth in
2008; they are the senior market, MICE, educational tour, luxury
market, and two-way traffic business.
Senior citizens are strongly motivated to travel compared with
other generations and are quick to respond when appropriate measures
are taken by travel agencies. KNT explores business opportunities in
educational tours as overseas travel demand is growing among
vocational technical schools.
Two-way traffic business means an engagement with the business
tie-up with foreign municipalities or travel agencies, and in 2007
the company, under collaboration with Korea Tourism Organization
(KTO), could handle 150,991 Japanese tourists to Korea, up 25.1
percent from the year earlier, exceeding the set target of 150,000;
therefore, it plans to make an approach to various organizations to
implement similar projects.
KNT is going to make the most of charter flights to counter the
airlines' move to pull back from leisure routes. Non-stop flight,
travel at the best season - these are the advertising pitch to induce
consumers to the charter flight. Besides, the company is eager to
leverage the bulk purchase of the air seats as an opportunity to
exploit new destinations, to orchestrate the group's power, and to
heighten the inventory management skill.
The target number of customers flown on the charter flights is
set for 38,000, up 10 percent from last year. In 2007, tours to
Switzerland operated on Edelweiss Air's charter carried 1,911
customers, filling 95 percent of the available seats. This year
again, KNT plans to use nine charters to Switzerland from June to
August with a target of 2,600 customers.
In addition, it is going to employ charter flights to Rota,
Northern Mariana Islands, from Narita for the first time in the
industry; they are supposed to make 40 trips over a year, carrying
approximately 6,000 tourists altogether.
As far as the Beijing Olympic Games are concerned, KNT is
striving to send 6,000 spectators to China and to receive 1,000
athletes to Japan for the pre-Olympic camp training.
* KNT's target number of customers for 2008 by destination
U.S.A.: 75,000
Europe: 80,000
Canada: 20,000
Hawaii: 180,000
Oceania: 80,000
Micronesia: 91,000
China: 95,000
Taiwan: 60,000
Asia: 349,000
Total: 1,030,000
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