Is JTB worth saving?

The largest travel agency in Japan, JTB, is closing 200 of its stores. No wonder: In the age of the Internet, who needs a travel agent? Travellers make their booking themselves on the Internet, and get a better price than they would have got from any travel agent - and the airlines and hotels make more off them, too. But the troubles of JTB are a symptom of something else, which is worth sacrifacing a travel agency for: The opening up of Japan. Again. 

But if you book everything yourself you have to take care of everything yourself. Keeping track of what bookings you have made is no big deal. Finding out where you are going is a different matter. When the travel agency is not there to make recommendations, how do you find out what hotels are good for staying in - and which are not worth the price? Looking at the reviews from travellers who have been there before is the only workable way.

That goes for finding out the goal of your travel, too, and navigating it. Travel programs on television, magazines and newspapers will be the source of discoveries. Japanese media are full of travel articles, programs, and blogs from travellers who are keen on finding new things and places to go. They have become important, because if the TV programs and magazines want to keep their audience, they will have to turn to blogs, with the audience participation that blogs have automatically built in. And Japanese love to blog - there are more blogs in Japanese relative to the population than any other language. 

Sharing discoveries become an opportunity to form a community around discoveries, sharing with the other people who go to the same places - or whose footsteps you follow. Guidebooks help, but they are too overwhelming - trying to cover everything, they become impossible to navigate. Not guidebooks anymore, they are more like encyclopedias. Being a guide, however, is not only a matter of holding up the flag and walking in front of the crowd anymore. It is being a part of a community of visitors, some of whom come to your home town. 

If you let people ask you to help, you will have to help them with the part that JTB was always famous for: Helping people get around. Anyone, at least in Europe, remembers the busloads of Japanese tourists stopping in front of any decent view, offloading a horde of salarymen and their wives snapping photos from the moment they stepped through the door, entering and being gone in five minutes. That was where JTB got big, and how they could arrange thousands of trips per year: Taking care of everything in a foreign country, for people who could not manage. 

Today, the Japanese are different. Their English may leave a lot to wish, but they are eager to get around on their own. They will travel anyplace, and they will manage to get to the weirdest places. Which includes navigating local buses, railroad time tables, and finding ways of getting around - including speaking a few words of the language. They are not satisfied with sitting in a bus with other Japanese, they want to experience of the place they are going. Like other travellers. 

When they do not have the guide JTB sent with them (on Japanese charter trips, the guide follows the tour group form their departure airport, all the way there and back), they have to trust the people they meet. Japanese are traditionally xenophobic, but young Japanese are learning to trust the foreign people they meet. 

When you trust someone when you meet them abroad, you will trust them when they come to you. Japanese meeting people abroad, sharing their experiences, will be happy to receive the visitors when they come to them. And they will have discovered that the language does not have to be the barrier their parents thought. 

But there is still a ways to go, and even if Japan has one of the worlds most mature Internet cultures, booking available for anyone, you discover quickly that this only works if you understand Japanese. Getting a 20 % higher price when you book through the English page of the site, finding that the most unreliable translations in Google Translate is Japanese to English (even making mistakes on negative statements), Japan has quite a bit to go before it has opened up to foreigners. Young Japanese will have some work to do if they want their foreign friends to get around easily. But it will not save JTB.