Happy New Year 2025 !!

Happy new year from all of us here at Japan Travel Pros!

We hope that 2024 has been a year of joy and success for you, and we wish you and yours all the best of health, happiness, prosperity and great travels ahead in 2025!!!

Just a few thoughts in this edition of the blog, if you’ll indulge us, on the year that was 2024.

2024 – a Record Year for Japan Travel

It’s been a record year for Japan travel. Some 35 million people will have visited Japan in 2024, an all-time high.

That’s… pretty amazing!

The growing trends for Japan as a top-tier global destination started long before the pandemic, and well before the yen became so cheap. Of course, now that the borders have been re-opened for a couple of years and the yen is at something like a 40-year low, tourism is booming indeed.

We’re really excited to see this. We’re happy to welcome people to Japan. And it’s our pleasure to help people plan their Japan holidays.

With the travel boom in Japan comes a distinct set of challenges.

Overtourism is real. Not everywhere, mind you, but in a handful of Japan’s major tourist attractions and areas, the crowds are getting pretty thick. “Everyone’s going to the same places at the same time,” said a famous travel writer. Um, yes, exactly.

Does that mean you have to go there? Does that mean you shouldn’t go there? These are the types of questions we help travelers to Japan with (the correct answer is “no” to both, by the way).

But… those places are filling up.

On recent visits to Kyoto, for example, we experienced packed crowds and very frustrating, tiring (at times) levels of people all determined to get the same selfie at the same place as everyone else. On the other hand, we also experienced those same places in the later evening and early morning hours, when nobody was around and the atmosphere was magical. 

These trends are picking up not just in the major hubs of Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka, but elsewhere in Japan. New ‘golden routes’ are seeing loads of tourists in Hokkaido’s Otaru-Sapporo-Asahikawa corridor, for example, among other locales.

Places that we even recently recommended as relative “hidden gems” in Japan are being discovered and widely covered. Hey, that’s the nature of information in the age we live in, isn’t it. We’re not gatekeepers here at Japan Travel Pros, and while it’s our honor and pleasure to share the best of Japan travel with you, we have to be realistic about expectations and the growing popularity of Japan as a destination.

In the weeks, months and years to come, we’ll continue to seek out lesser visited destinations in Japan and recommend those to our clients – along with as little or as much as you want to see of the major sights in (of course) Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, etc.

An Honor & a Privilege – Japan Travel Pros

To everyone we’ve been able to help this year, and to those who’ve chosen Japan Travel Pros for your itinerary planning and virtual concierge/guide services, we want to express our sincere gratitude.

We’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many wonderful and interesting people during 2024, people from all walks of life and from all around the world. We look forward to meeting more folks in the coming year and being able to help in any way we can.

Our mission remains clear and strong: to help showcase the best of Japan to the world, and to help travelers experience the best of Japan.

As you can tell, we serve two constituencies: travelers, and Japan as a whole.

For travelers to Japan, we are committed to bringing you objective insights from people who live here and love to travel.  We want to be your ally and champion, supporting your journeys in Japan and helping guide you before, during and after.

For the Japanese people, we are committed to helping educate & inform international visitors so that they can be best prepared when arriving in and traveling through Japan. In our own small way, we want to help achieve better cross-cultural understanding, cooperation and communication.

Maybe those are lofty goals. But since it’s personal for us, why not dream big?!!

Make your 2025 a great one!