Japanese travel agencies have trouble selling Olympic tour packages
Asahi’s English edition ran an article the other day about how travel packages to the Beijing Olympics are not selling well in Japan. It may be due to concerns about earthquakes, unsafe food, and the Tibet situation, but it could also be because the tour packages just aren’t attractive:
The Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) initially asked the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee for 140,000 tickets to the Games. The JOC could obtain half of that number.
And only a small number of the 70,000 tickets include sport events popular with Japanese people. That has led to headaches for the eight travel companies designated by the JOC to sell the tour packages.
On July 1, Tokyo-based ANA Sales Co. reduced the price of its three-day tour package, which includes a women’s volleyball match, from 298,000 yen to 198,000 yen. It also discounted the prices of tours for table tennis and badminton.
Although volleyball, table tennis and badminton are popular events for Japanese, participants in those tours have no assurances that they will see Japanese players in action.
The person in charge of the tours said the tickets went on sale in late June, but the company received no applications.
ANA Sales has sold only about 60 percent of its 2,000 tour packages to see various Olympic events.
The company is now packaging the unsold tickets with other tours to Beijing.
The article goes on to mention that another big travel agency, Kinki Nihon, has only 4,000 of its 6,000 tour tickets, and cancellations are offsetting new sales.
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Stay in Japan and watch the Olympics events YOU enjoy in HDTV in the comfort of your own home, then head out to a beer garden or fireworks.
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Pay a LOT of money to spend a couple nights in what is probably going to be a hell of police-state security, pollution, summer heat without universal AC, the inevitability of some kind of food-poisoning and cover-up, and likely ridiculously high prices for everything, in a country where half the citizens hate you just because you’re Japanese, hoping anti-Japanese protestors are banned from any competition you attend, to see sports nobody cares about?
I wouldn’t go even if they were actually giving these tours away for free.
Some heads will roll at the travel agencies for this blunder.
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China the air is so polluted I wont be surprise if not too many people will go to the Olympic.
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