Sustainability of Tourism Intermediaries in Japan

This chapter looks at Japan’s tourism intermediaries that work as the agent between service providers and service consumers in the tourism market. Usually, tourism intermediaries can be divided into tour operators and travel agents. A main difference between these two is that the former create tourism products, typically package holidays, and also sell them to consumers, whilst the latter only sell tourism products. However, this classification is not common in Japan and a categorisation of tour operators with three groups is much more widely accepted. These three differ in terms of holidays they can make and geographical regions they can deal with as tour destinations. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the business environment surrounding Japan’s tourism intermediaries has already become challenging mainly due to the rise and development of direct marketing and selling between service providers and consumers without the intermediaries and those of online travel agents, particularly hotel booking websites. This trend has been geared by the advancement of the Internet, especially Web 2.0. Overall, this shift has damaged the economic sustainability of tourism intermediaries. A decrease in the number of people who uses the services offered by traditional tourism intermediaries means decline of their presence in current Japanese society. This can also be comprehended as the weakened socio-cultural sustainability of tourism intermediaries. In relation to the environmental sustainability, a major way for tourism intermediaries to contribute to this is to promote ecotourism by planning and conducting various eco tours. In recent years, tourism intermediaries’ activities for CSR also work as those for SDGs, especially for the goals related to natural environment, including elements of 3Rs and the mottainai spirit in their tours.