Part 4. Interaction with government, industry, and businesses
See part 1 for an introduction. My experience as a small tour operator in Japan.
A monitor tour
Though we had a blanket “no” policy to dreaded monitor tours, in our third year a local group needed foreign people as guests in a package tour they had created. This tour was a shining example of “design by committee.” In the same way that foreign visitors cannot see what makes something more authentic, the creators of this tour couldn’t know why their tour was so unsuitable for foreign guests. No foreign people had been involved in the creation, months of time and effort were used to discover a glaring and obvious problem. A 30 minute meeting with a foreign person, or months of work by many office workers, either seems fine when the goal is to satisfy the grant checkboxes and not make a good product.
Our biggest discovery from the tour was the conditions of those working for the JA (Japanese Agriculture Co-op). On a 38C Summer day, we entered a brand new airconditioned JA building to learn to cook using brand new and expensive camping equipment. An army of staff watched over all 4 guests. Leaving the airconditioned building we headed to greenhouses, wearing brand new fan jackets. After an introduction to a green house with no one working there, by chance we could see another greenhouse where workers were picking. In the heat of a greenhouse on a 38C day, a small number of South East Asian women were picking as quickly as they could, not being able to take a break to say hello to the group of managers and foreign people that entered. The staff and farmer continued on as if everything was normal, all the while my wife and I questioned if they knew how close this seemed to modern day slavery.
Our experience didn’t improve much beyond this point. Continuing to the packaging plant, a huge building nearby, we entered the warehouse where the products were stored and packed by Japanese staff — in strong air conditioning.
Some travel agents to Japan blacklist experiences like this where there is potential for showing human rights issues, and from this tour it was easy to see why. As expected, my feedback as a guest of this monitor tour was ignored.
Seminars
Perhaps the creators of the above monitor tour could benefit from free inbound tourism seminars hosted by the prefecture (and at times companies). We attended a number of these during our second and third years. These seminars often have a time for presentations and some networking time afterwards. Often the people attending are not working very close to the coal face, with few English-speaking guides or sales staff.
There’s comparatively so few businesses in this prefecture focusing on inbound tourism that we would see familiar faces each time, and the events were a nice chance to catch up. The content of the seminars was at times good, it told the attendees that you shouldn’t be throwing shit at a wall and expecting it to stick (the traditional approach of the tourism industry in Japan for decades). That said, unfortunately with the government turning their focus and funding towards luxury tourism, many seminars focused on the luxury market. This makes a problem where companies look at guests as walking money sponges to be squeezed.
The seminars would give appropriate suggestions for marketing products to high spending guests, all things interesting to number crunching managers, but not so much to us. One speaker in particular often sold the merits of his apparently successful luxury travel agency, but they had fewer TripAdvisor reviews than us, with a lower score, and they didn’t seem to offer anything unique. While listening to the speaker convince the suits in the room that his advice was based on his success (he was a great presenter), I found the Google Reviews for his business said otherwise, with many people complaining that they were scammed and they could have bought their tickets elsewhere for much less. We knew to be careful with advice from these kinds of trend-chasing (and often new) businesses.
These kinds of seminars encourage those in the industry to focus only on highly profitable tours and experiences with less authenticity, selling either enough for visitors or expensively packaged enough (the original horse). They also advise people to invest in selling the automobile option, the barely traditional experiences that will sell well now, instead of using the higher prices of the luxury market to enable more immersive and traditional options, the luxury form of better horse.
VJTM and business meetings
In 2025 we were lucky to be able to join the Visit Japan Travel and Mice (VJTM) business sales meetings of the Tourism Bureau’s Japan Travel Expo. To be considered for these meetings you generally need to team up with other businesses, join with a local Destination Management Organisation (DMO) or city, or have experience selling at previous sessions. It was fascinating to be able to interact with very large foreign travel agencies.
Some of the agents we met were great, and in those cases both sides learned a lot. An agent from a large travel agency in Sweden helped us to understand how trends were impacting their normal business. “Travelling in Japan is too easy now,” she told us, telling us how her company is not focusing on organising private group itineraries any more, now spending more of their effort on group tours. In her company’s case, the safety and perceived ease of travelling through Japan had led to more guests planning and booking their own trip. Other agents said similar things, and in some cases it was opposite (gave up on group tours, focusing on FIT).
We also met some less friendly agents at VJTM 2025, and it should be said that with such a tight schedule and intense Japanese business atmosphere, it makes sense that some agents ran out of energy and patience. Business cards and paper sales materials are effectively banned by the organisers because it overwhelms the buyers, but many sellers still trade business cards one by one, and give the buyers a stack of flyers. At times 6 or 7 people will awkwardly introduce themselves and their business one by one, surrounding a single person who is trying their best to understand as one English interpreter translates for them all (in a 20 minute meeting).
Our overall impression from VJTM 2025 was that agencies were wanting easy sales - safe and quick sales. The luxury market was even seeming a little desperate. The agents were also looking for existing horses and automobiles, enough to make solid sales with guests that are satisfied enough. Better horses were a more time consuming sell, even if guests said they wanted it, they really wanted the basic options.
During 2025 I had a quite strange experience trying an online business to business session, organised by the Tourism Bureau and their US office. Taking a slot during US daytime (11pm Japan time), and paying ~$200 for the privilege, I did my best to sell what we had in the very short 9 minute blocks we were allocated in each Zoom breakout room.
My memory of the 2 hour session is more funny than my experience during. My wife was falling asleep as I gripped my coffee and prepared my slideshow for my 9 minutes with about 10 US agencies per breakout room. In the first breakout room, almost every participant was a woman in their 50’s or 60’s, I didn’t think much of this until I noticed every single breakout room was the same. I tried my best to get through my presentation and leave some time for questions, which mostly worked. There weren’t many questions however, and after joining each breakout room it was clear to see faces looking more and more exhausted. These sessions had been as exhausting for the buyers as they were for the sellers. Overall this session had not helped us at all, but at least we learned that many of the smaller and/or niche agencies in the US were run by roughly the same demographic, and that many agencies of this size are looking to offer tours in Japan.
In 2026 we again had the chance to join the VJTM. Being much more picky and realistic this time, I focused only on agents that had the capacity to sell our better horse, our more immersive and authentic products.
Oddly, we had interest from Asian agencies for the first time, and our meetings almost all came from buyers requesting us (2025 was the opposite). Honestly the meetings with Asian agencies proved to be a waste of everyone’s time, with many looking for large group tour options. The Asian agencies I spoke to seemed to be desperate for options, but in the end they wanted things that were quite cliche and easy to find in more popular areas.
Compared to 2025 we had more in-depth and constructive conversations with a small number of agencies, and we look forward to working with them in the future as they seem more interested in trying to sell the better horse, putting in more effort to sell more authentic experiences that will satisfy their guests more than enough.
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Overall from VJTM 2026 I could see that the government is pushing for more tourism from Asia, and that many agencies seem to be looking for alternatives to overtouristed destinations. Compared to 2025, they seemed to be looking for unique and easy-to-sell options for groups and FIT. Some repeat buyers had also pivoted to completely luxury markets, showing where their sales come from now.
Overall from business to business meetings we’ve learned so much, and while they are not always worth the money at our scale, they’ve been great opportunities. For someone at our level, I would recommend to skip smaller events and aim for VJTM only.
Working for other tour companies
Changes in tourism laws in Japan opened the possibility for people without interpreter guide licences to openly work as guides. Of course, those with licences did not like this, but the changes were made due to a lack of good, reliable licenced guides across Japan. Some agencies even have a blacklist based on the performance of these licenced guides. Now agents can look elsewhere.
As a highly rated guide, I’ve been given some opportunities to work for other companies as an unlicensed guide in areas outside of Okumikawa. While a local guide and a regular tour guide are both considered tour guides, the job is very different. Responsibilities, challenges, duties, motivations are all very different compared to tours run in the area you live in.
The desperate search by agencies for good guides led to a hilarious (after the fact) job interview, first for my wife, and later, chaotically, for myself. A reasonably sized and rather new Japanese inbound agency was interviewing my wife for a bookings position, making bookings for agency itineraries. The CEO and hiring manager were in the zoom call, and while the CEO was friendly, the attitude of the hiring manager was cold. When my wife said she admired the company’s goals of encouraging travel to real countryside and unknown locations, the hiring manager quickly stepped in to mention that they gave up on that, now only sending people to the already popular countryside of the Kumano Kodo and Nakasendo. My wife was taken aback by this, but she was more taken aback when the hiring manager erroneously posted in the call-wide chat that she felt my wife was using them as a stepping stone, and that she would soon quit, meaning she shouldn’t get the job. Trying to hide her laughter at seeing this message sent publicly, my wife continued the interview.
They then asked if she could be a tour guide, because they were getting desperate. My wife has great English but not the confidence to do long term guiding work, so she suggested me instead. Called into the room while in my pajamas, it was then my turn to be interviewed about a guiding position. This company was so desperate for guides that they immediately offered for me to run multi-day hiking tours along a dangerous stretch of the Kumano Kodo, with no tour conductor, just myself as the “tour leader.” The tone of the hiring manager and the whole situation made me uneasy, it was a very dangerous offer. Saying I would think about it, they then offered money for writing short articles for their site to be picked up by AI bots. Feeling very uneasy about this company, I chose to have nothing to do with them. I feel this was the right decision.
A tour I did take on as a tour guide was for a foreign agency that does tours of Japan exclusively each year, with travellers that have been to Japan many, many times. In this case the agency, fed up with tour guides of previous tours (likely licenced guides), requested a “young, punctual and passionate” guide for their next trip, so I was recommended by a business acquaintance. In this case they would have been desperate had they not met me the year before. We managed to run the 11 day itinerary and solve the problems caused by improper preparation, slow communication, and relying too much on social media for itinerary information.
This tour was the kind where a foreign agency develops an itinerary and pays a Japanese company to make the bookings and run it. From the start the itinerary had some issues, and it took some time for things to be worked out between the two parties, sometimes too late.
The tour ended and the guests seemed satisfied, but I learned from the experience that this kind of guiding, looking after a group point to point and managing the admin of the itinerary day-to-day, is not really tour guiding. It’s the work of “tour leaders” or “tour conductors” that used to accompany tour guides before it became too expensive to hire both. I found it nearly impossible to actually discuss the locations we visited and to guide the guests in any way other than physically guiding them from one place to another. In the future I will be thinking carefully about accepting work that is closer to tour conductor than tour guide.
I have a feeling from my experiences so far and my interactions with agencies that guides are less in demand, with most agencies just needing a human there to just run the logistics of the itinerary. A guide to give a story and deeper meaning may be the better horse, something not necessary when most guests are satisfied enough by being moved from place to place.
I’ve also taken on emergency freelance work for a large foreign luxury agency that desperately needed guides to fill sakura season tours they oversold. These tours in Kyoto and Tokyo had a atmosphere closer to hand-holding and translation rather than guiding in the traditional sense. The itineraries of these kinds of luxury tours are often great examples of the original horse and automobile, with very little depth or authenticity, with the guide filling time in overtouristed locations.
Agencies using AI
One special example of my work for a foreign agency shows how we need to carefully use AI in tourism. While it was exactly the kind of tour guiding I am best at, it was a trial by fire because of the agency.
This agency (that I will refer to as “Agency A”) relied on AI too heavily, right at the start of the process of creating their tour, nearly leading to disaster. Please note this is an anecdote from my information and experience, intending to show outcomes of AI use, and how in the end agents learn from their mistakes. The agent that made these mistakes has learned, and they are now more knowledgeable than agents yet to offer tours in Japan.
Stories occasionally appear in the Japanese media about the impact of AI on tourism and some of its problems (for example outdated training data giving outdated information). Many visitors are starting to use AI to create their itineraries, a part of the process previously done by hand or by travel agencies, and it’s starting to show where the practical problems of AI in tourism exist. Agency A asked the right kind of question for the AI, with a specific interest, some “must visit” points, and a number of people, but their example shows how too much trust in the AI combined with sparse communication and delegation of responsibility led to a tour that only took place through feats of effort and skill.
As the first Japanese tour of Agency A, they tried to use their extensive experience organising tours in Europe to make a great itinerary, with as smooth a process as possible. Their start was to ask an AI to create an itinerary. The AI gave them an itinerary catered to their style of tour, and the agent decided it was good enough to take to a Japanese DMC (a local company that can make bookings and help them make the tour a reality). Various miscommunications and misunderstandings later, guests had already paid for the tour, even though no work had been done to confirm the viability of the itinerary, find guides, or set prices per guest. Crisis meetings started a month or two before the start date. A different company would make bookings and ensure things worked from start to end, in meetings the agent stepped through the itinerary and made sweeping changes as necessary to remove AI hallucinations and out of date information. Unreasonable transport times were fixed, non-existent destinations were removed, abandoned locations were changed to running experiences.
One unique experience I will never forget is the agent searching Google Maps on a shared screen for a location from the original itinerary suggested by ChatGPT, only to find that the location had long ago become an old people’s home.
The biggest issues were fixed, and the tour started. Almost daily we encountered problems left behind by the initial itinerary design and miscommunication from months earlier, but working with the DMC these were mostly resolved. During the trip there were of course some complaints about the changes to the itinerary, but the unique nature of this tour thankfully meant many guests were more flexible with their expectations. Everyone involved learned from this process how dangerous trusting the output of AI so much could lead to such a messy and costly process.
The tour, even with its problems, was a great opportunity to give guests the better horse, through my guiding and position as a guide (not a tour conductor), and with some ability to change how we visited some overtouristed areas.
In the next part (Part 5)
Can you give the customer exactly what they want? Here’s a link.
