The current market situation and exit of COVID-19
Market situation
Japan is not exception. We have been suffering from COVID-19 outbreak from March. If you target Japanese market, naturally it’s important to follow the daily situation, but it should be in multilingual, checked quickly and at a glance. There is very simple, easy-to-understanding tracking website (https://covid19japan.com) created by two non-Japanese guys living in Japan.
As you see, the number of the infected patients in Japan is 15,218 and 553 were died as of 5 of May. Both of them have been increasing everyday, but the pace is much slower and it’s much smaller number than in some European countries and USA. Even the number of new cases have been decreasing in last two weeks. But many Japanese doubt over transparency of public data, because there are quite limited number of people tested (Only 154,646 tests done until 5 of May) It seems Japanese ministry of Health and Labor tries to limit the testing to avoid medical collapse due to its capacity.
Japanese government announced state emergency between 7 of April and 6 of May over whole Japan to try to reduce human contacts by 80%. Restaurants, bars, shops are recommended to close down, all big events are cancelled, people are recommended to stay home except for necessary errands and needed exercises. But this doesn’t mean lock down of the cities, Japanese law doesn’t allow such mandate restriction, people still have freedom to move around and travel domestically. So we needed to rely on people’s conscience and common sense. We are at the end of big spring holiday season now called Golden Week, but there are much less people on the streets. Occupancy ratio of bullet train is only less than 10%, accommodation is less than 20% now. It looks like the government’s goal was reached.
However prime minister, Mr. Shinzo Abe told at press conference last night to extend it until the end of May. Because big cities and metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and surroundings are still in critical situation.
Tourism and travel industry
Domestic flights are drastically reduced and almost all international passenger flights are cancelled. The tourists coming to Japan should be quarantined for 14 days after health checking at the airports and are not allowed to use public transportations.
The damage on travel industry both on inbound and outbound traveling is historically big and offices in major companies are closed from April.
The measures taken by travel agencies for package tours to foreign countries are as follows:
JTB: All canceled until 30 of June
HIS: All canceled until 30 of June
(They are promoting cancel support insurance)
Club Tourism: All canceled until 15 of June
( They shift to autumn, winter products)
Tabikobo: All canceled until 21 of June
Hankyu Express : To be announced tour by tour
JTB media retailing: All canceled until 30 of June
When is the exit ?
Some of the European airlines expect to start flights from Tokyo, Haneda and Narita airport at the beginning of July depending on the situation. But flights from local airports such as Osaka, Nagoya will be after Tokyo.
Further other local airports such as Sapporo and Fukuoka flights could resume next year.
We had online seminar by JATA on Monday,Tuesday last week and they expect recovery will start from domestic traveling at the earliest in September.
Japanese government prepared 15 billion EUR stimulus package for recovery of domestic traveling. Recovery of outbound travel to other countries will start from closest destinations such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, China almost
at the same time as domestic traveling. However recovery of the business to long haul destinations including Europe will be after November at the earliest. Also recovery will start from frequent travelers, repeaters, individual tourists and brave and active young generation. Senior generation traveling the group could be the last one to recover. I fully agree with this view at the moment.
Also they mentioned about the point of post-corona products: Not crowded, clean and healthy. I would like to add that the nature related activities , family travel and sustainable products will take more consumer’s attention.
Some agents started to sell the products in winter 2020-2021. There are no products planned in 2021, yet on the market.
Regarding the activities by national tourist organizations, many look for the chance to organize non face-to-face activities like online seminar already in May. German tourist office announced series of 30 minutes destination seminar on Youtube. We already organized the first online seminar for travel trade in cooperation with JATA on trend of millennial generation on 13 of April.
Many of the other real sales functions are postponed after October.