Golden Week
On top of spring holidays in March, we have another holiday season called Golden Week between the end of April and the beginning of May. During these weeks there such national holidays as Showa Day on April 29th , Constitution memorial Day on May 3rd , Green Day on May 4th and Children’s Day on May 5th.
(Showa day is originally emperor’s birthday of Showa era. )
If people combine few paid holidays with these, sometimes the length of holidays is almost 10 days. As this is the season with the best weather of the year, some travel regardless domestic or international destinations and others go back to their hometowns to be with their family. The term, Golden Week was generated by Daiei company, which is one the Japanese major movie company in 1951 because their box-office profits were the biggest in a year during these weeks at that time.
Naturally it’s quite important holidays for tourism business regardless domestic or outbound destinations. Most of the domestic and international flights, bullet trains and accommodations are full. Main roads are suffering from traffic congestion whole days. Many of package tours are also fully booked. Golden Week is a big opportunity for you to get Japanese tourists because it’s Japan specific holiday season.
Usually Japanese travel agencies or land operators tries to book as many rooms or seats as possible during this period. But you need to pay careful attention on the calendar, sometimes the order of national holidays and weekends are not best combination for longer holidays. In that case, materialization ratio might not so high or the group might be smaller than expected. Sometimes the group is too big for pre-booking. There are possibilities of both over booking and opportunity loss. So I would like to recommend two things.
1, Check the Japanese calendar carefully before booking.
2, Keep on eyes on the booking situation regularly already the beginning of the year.
I attached Japanese calendar during Golden Week 2021, which could be your reference. As you see, 3 paid holidays makes 11days off.
Japan is also suffering from COVID-19 now. Unfortunately we lost most of outbound tourists in spring time and may be in summer. So the situation is totally different, we are on “Stay home week” ( Slogan by Ms.Yuriko Koike, governor of Tokyo) instead of Golden Week.
