Keeping you abreast of what's going on in the
Japanese travel and tourism industries.
News consolidated by Travel Vision, Inc. updated every week.
Mr. Maruo, Vice President of JR West, Nominated as Next President of
NTA to Assume Post Early July End-May 2008
Kazuaki Maruo, vice president, representative director and
executive officer of West Japan Railway Co. (known as JR West), was
nominated as the next president of Nippon Travel Agency (NTA). The
board of directors of JR West and the special meeting of the board of
NTA decided on May 16 to appoint him to the position. Akira Kanai,
now the president, becomes the chairman. Both of them take up the new
positions early July.
Mr. Maruo had become a representative director and senior
managing director of JR West after the tragic accident of train
derailment at Amagasaki and in June 2006 assumed the position of vice
president, representative director and general manager for Railway
Operations Headquarters.
Mr. Kanai has been the president of NTA for six years and a half
since September 2001. He tried to lay a scheme to amalgamate NTA with
Kinki Nippon Tourist but gave it up in February 2002. He formulated a
five-year business plan named NTA Innovation instead and put the
company on course to recovery. He again drew up a medium-range plan
of three years starting from 2008, steering the company to survive
major changes in the travel market.
Good Luck Tour Indicates Gross Price for Tours Flown on Cathay
Pacific; Eager to Have New IT Fares End-May 2008
Good Luck Tour Co. has released wholesale package tours flown on
Cathay Pacific Airways with prices shown in a gross method. The tour
prices include fuel surcharge, passenger facility charge at airport,
and taxes where necessary.
The agency gives the gross prices to Hong Kong tours flown on
Cathay on an experimental basis for departures from April 1 through
July 12. It is going to expand the method to other Cathay tours
including those bound for Taipei, Penang, and Bangkok departing from
June 18 through October 31.
Retailers receive those products favorably, giving such
encouraging remarks as: "They are worth recommending to the
customers," or "We want to make a special display rack for
'gross-price products.'"
The president of Good Luck Tour comments on the gross pricing
method as follows: "Initially, we conceived this idea as a means to
make our products look competitive and gain bigger sales. However,
the surcharge amount has become so big as to be equal to the travel
cost itself depending on destinations and airlines, or even to
surpass the relevant PEX fare. That is unacceptable. We simply want
to remove consumers' distrust."
He cites the reason to choose only Cathay as a carrier for the
gross pricing method, saying that the surcharge of Cathay is
relatively small and holds good for six full months once it is fixed,
which makes product planning easy.
This means that Good Luck Tour still finds it hard to do the same
with other airlines. However, the agency looks forward to
implementation of new IT fares for package tours as Japan Association
of Travel Agents (JATA) made request earlier to airlines by letter.
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