Our family took a vacation this summer in Japan. The island nation has always been a popular tourist destination, but the recent weakness in the yen has made it even more popular and therefore crowded with foreign travelers just like us. Even just sticking with the popular cities and attractions, our trip delivered novel experiences—food, public transportation, shopping, sights and sounds—that make traveling to new places worthwhile.
Our friends, having recently returned from their Japanese travels, advised us to figure out our itineraries well ahead of time. We expected months-long lead times to book better rates for flights and hotels, but some other considerations included:
- Trains lines and schedules, particularly for anything limited or during busy weekends or holidays,
- Popular museums, shrines, temples, and observation decks,
- Restaurants, both the formal types and popular themed character spots unique to Japan,
- Theme parks1.
In doing all this pretravel research, I even came across this subreddit, /r/JapanTravel, boasting almost 3 million subscribers where would-be travelers post their itineraries for commentary daily.
Japan has been dealing with this travel crowding issue for a long time2, and use a plethora of online reservation systems to manage the flow of visitors. Most attractions have full websites that embed online ordering and payments, and some feature separate portals for domestic and international travelers. One restaurant even required us to place a lunch order for eating in, 3 weeks before our visit, to make sure they had the ingredients.
The process isn’t terribly different than, say, making a reservation through OpenTable or buying tickets to the zoo online and presenting barcodes for entry. The anxiety comes from the real demand, that pushes venues to implement timed entry systems, website queues, lotteries, and other mechanisms for relatively limited supplies. It’s like every venue is holding a Taylor Swift concert, and having to deal with influxes of users clamoring for a handful of spots. For instance, I’m pretty sure that the very popular Pokemon Cafe is targeted by bots and their 28-day reservations are scooped up within 30 seconds of release3. This is where having a dedicated foreign traveler reservation can be useful; I saw one site ask for arrival/departure information as a part of the checkout process to decrease the chances of their tickets getting scalped.
Yet somehow, the major theme parks are the attractions that understand how much leverage they have to apply basic economic pricing principles to their reservations. A part of me admires how much they’ve optimized their systems, even as I’m annoyed that it takes multiple queues, purchases, and upgrades to get onto one popular ride. Disney already does this across most of their parks: you can just reserve ride spots days ahead of time and legitimately cut your way to the front of the queue with money. Universal Studios Japan is even more egregious, in that they have the regular park entrance fee, then add-ons that cost as much as the ticket to reduce wait times for a couple of rides4, and then a very expensive VIP tour package that truly skips the lines for 5× the price. Squint a bit, and it starts looking like Economy, Business, and First Class seating delineations.
It reminds me of the old economic truism, that price discrimination and dynamic pricing can provide a better equilibrium between supply and demand in aggregate, but it doesn’t feel fair or justified in individual instances. Fortunately, outside of the most popular theme parks, I haven’t seen this level of capacity micro-optimization stateside—yet.
Though nowadays, parks are crowded everywhere↩
We heard a good amount of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean spoken at popular sites; it was indicative of Japan’s popularity as a travel spot just within East Asia.↩
Which, for the record, happens at 6pm JST every night.↩
But not quite to the front of the line; there’s still a 10–15 minute wait even in the express queue.↩
