Japan's inbound travel market has continuously grown in number since the launch of "Visit Japan Campaign (VJC)" in 2003,
Recent worldwide economic slowdown also slowed down the travel market which is currently on a plateau. In the mean time, the characteristic of each market has become more apparent as the market size has grown.
This report tries to make comparison of the two largest repeat visitor generating market, Hong Kong and Taiwan to seek for the keys to recover from the recent decline of Japan inbound travel market.

JNTO has recently announced the number of international visitor arrival in February 2009. The released data shows that the international tourist arrival in February 2009 dropped by 41.3 % from the same period of the previous year, making it a decline for seven consecutive months. A decrease is observed in all of the 12 target markets for Visit Japan Campaign.

Besides the influence of the lunar New Year falling on in the end of January, which was in February last year, the decline is largely due to the economic recession and worldwide financial crisis coupled with the depreciation of their currency against JPY.
Visit Japan Campaign has been successful over the last six years in steadily expanding the inbound travel market. The international tourist arrival to Japan used to be 5.21 million in 2003, the first year of VJC. The figure has grown to 8.35 million in 2008. The number of international visitors has increased by 3.14 million in five years making the market scale 1.6 times larger.

Now what will be the next steps for further expansion of Japan inbound travel market that has enjoyed a healthy growth? The first step should be to identify the characteristics of each tourist generating market that have contributed to increase the number of travelers to Japan.

The share of repeat visitors among travelers to Japan is one of the indicators of the maturity of each region's outbound market to Japan. Let's take a look at the "share of repeat visitors to Japan" in recently released flash report by JNTO, the "Survey of Overseas Visitors to Japan in 2008".

Table-1 shows that the share of repeat visitors to Japan in Hong Kong market is 79% and 72.1% in Taiwan market, much higher than other international markets. Among the visitors to Japan from these two countries, 85.5% and 73.6% respectively visit Japan on leisure purpose (table-2), again the distribution is higher than that of the rest of the countries on the list.

Table1
※Repeat tourists：Who have visited Japan more than once before.

Table2

Although the two markets have in common a high share of repeat visitors and leisure travelers among visitors to Japan, the travel style of visitors from each market is quite different.
A majority of Taiwanese travel to Japan in group tours whilst visitors from Hong Kong are less likely to travel in groups (32.7%); nearly 70% of them travel individually either by individual arrangement or using 'air and hotel' packages. (Table 3)
Both markets share a common market trend that Japan is one of the most popular overseas destinations, but the survey result reveals different profiles of traveling population of the two regions; Taiwanese make repeat visit to Japan in group tours and very experienced Hong-Kong travelers enjoy individual travels.

Table 3

The difference in travel styles of these two markets leads to a following hypothesis that can be applied to marketing strategy.
In Taiwan, where travel agencies are the main travel distribution channel, the promotion toward travel agency is of much importance. In Hong-Kong, promotional activities directly toward consumers are more effective to capture the FIT market.
Improving the tourism infrastructure to receive FIT travelers is also very important. The language difference is not a big problem for group travelers escorted by a tour leader. But language is a critical factor for individual travelers who try to get tourist information while they are in Japan.

A Hong Kong travel planner, who recently visited Japan on his familiarization trip, emphasized the importance of taking measures to support Cantonese speaking visitors. It is not realistic, however, to expect language support in Cantonese at every tourist attraction in Japan. Still, first step that should be taken is to prepare the brochures written in traditional Chinese characters at tourist information center. Literatures written in traditional Chinese also cater to Taiwanese. For the accommodations and souvenir shops, illustration-aided conversation book will be a great help to communicate with foreign customers; they simply need to point at illustrations with words in foreign language.

Promoting travel plans with rental cars which allow experienced individual travelers from Hong Kong to freely drive around the destination is an effective way to attract them. The language barrier has discouraged them to drive rental cars in Japan.
In Okinawa, multiple language rental car service has just started this April. The vehicles are equipped with GPS navigation system that provides route guide service in five languages; Japanese, English, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese and Korean.
Being a destination that is well-prepared to serve international tourists is a great appeal to the Hong Kongese repeat travelers market.

Travelers from Hong Kong spend as much as 143,000 Yen per person (JNTO "Survey of Consumption trend of overseas visitors in 2007"). They are the biggest spenders among four major markets in Asia Now that Japan is facing a slow down of entire inbound travel market, isn't it a good chance to focus on this high spending Hong Kong individual market?