China to Japan travel demand booms: Air4Casts & Skyscanner provide timely new travel search analysis

CHINA/JAPAN. In the first of a regular new industry exclusive series* for The Moodie Davitt Report, Air4casts and Skyscanner, the global travel search engine with over 50 million unique visitors per month, reveal the extent of the Chinese visitor surge to Japan.

Live, online travel searches by individual consumers using the Skyscanner search engine underscore the recent huge popularity of Japan as a destination for the Chinese. Skyscanner’s first quarter 2016 data show that Tokyo is easily the top searched for destination out of Mainland China this year.

The Chinese Skyscanner search rankings

Beijing-to-Tokyo led the first quarter Chinese Skyscanner search league with Shanghai-to-Tokyo in second place.

Source: Skyscanner

Tokyo accounted for half of the top five Chinese searches in the first three months of this year.

“It is the independent, sophisticated Chinese traveller who uses the internet to search for flights and this is exactly the sort of traveller who is seeking flights to Tokyo,” said Jane Robinson of Air4casts. “The underlying trend is that Chinese still very much want to travel to Japan and that their travel patterns and aspirations are changing. The shift towards independent travel is increasing rapidly, particularly at the younger end of the Millennial generation.”

Haneda reaps the Chinese benefit

At the airport and terminal level, Air4casts’ nationality tracker highlights the differing monthly Chinese passenger profiles of Tokyo’s two airports, Haneda and Narita.

While Narita is the larger of the two, both overall and in volumes of Chinese travellers, Haneda has seen the fastest growth. Drive by the popularity of direct flights from Beijing, Haneda has become the airport of choice for large numbers of residents from the Chinese capital.

Source: AIr4Casts

Air4casts’ latest projections show that Haneda’s international terminal could easily expect to handle nearly 77 thousand departing Chinese nationals next month, a 40% increase on May 2015.

The peak Haneda Chinese shopper times

Targeting costly instore activations and promotions to capture the optimum number of high spending shoppers has never been more important

Source: Air4Casts

*BACKGROUND TO THE AIR4CASTS-SKYCANNER REPORT

The Air4casts-Skyscanner data cooperation is an exciting new form of analysis for travel retail, available only through the MoodieDavitt Report.

Air4casts’ Nationalities 1000 product provides the airport and terminal traveller nationality and peak shopper times data.

Skyscanner’s Travel Insight product provides the consumer search data: a comprehensive and unique ‘big data’ set that can accurately predict future demand by telling you where more than 50 million monthly users have been searching and booking their travel, giving an unrivalled and invaluable overview of market demand, including the most popular destinations, prices, and flight times. Travel Insight is part of Skyscanner for Business – a suite of tools helping to power the travel Internet.

For more information on Air4Casts click here and here.

For more information on Skyscanner’s Travel Insight data please click here

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