JR West and JAL, ANA Join Forces (Maybe)

Rail and Air plan to put aside their differences in the name of making Japan more accessible. Evan breaks down what this could mean for Japan travel - and the hiccups we should expect along the way.

A departure from the expected

Some pretty big news dropped in the world of Japan travel this week, and guess what – it’s all about you, the traveler from overseas!

JR West (in other words, the JR that handles all the Japan Rail routes on Honshu from the edge of Gifu and Toyama through Kansai/Kyoto/Osaka all the way west to Shimonoseki… more on that in a minute) announced in a press conference that they intend to build a joint online booking system by 2030. That’s right friends: air and rail, all in one spot.

I will not waste anyone’s time trying to argue against this idea, because let’s be honest – it’s a really good idea. Despite Japan’s popularity in the travel space right now, a big part of what we do at PacSet is navigating booking processes for a whole lot of companies that do a whole lot of things differently. And sure, you can look up Japan travel stuff on a search engine, or a site like Kayak, but it’s rarely the best way to get the best deal or plan stuff. So: how did we get here, and will this new planned venture between air and rail work?

WHERE WE’VE COME FROM

Until April 1987, both JAL and Japan National Railways (JNR) were government-owned entities, which means that while they did not work in tandem per se, they did serve the same purpose. ANA, on the other hand, was the smaller, private competitor. The opening of the first Shinkansen (“bullet train”) in 1964 reduced travel times between Tokyo and Osaka, but the plane was still competitive with the train on the route – not to mention other routes across the country. However, once JAL was privatized and JNR was privatized and split into seven different JR companies, things began to get more adversarial.

These days, Japan is a place where the rail actually competes with the plane in many markets, which is something we don’t really see in North America. For all but one of Japan’s major metro areas, the Shinkansen and rail can often get you there faster than the plane, depending on where you’re traveling from. The competition between rail and air has manifested in many ways. Among the examples: In the 1990s, JR Tokai (also known as JR Central) added new, faster, state-of-the-art train sets on the Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka (now known as “Nozomi'“), while airlines countered by reducing boarding times and strengthening connections to their robust international networks. Both airlines and railways invested in their own associate hotel properties, many of which bore their name (like the JAL City chain of hotels, or JR West’s upscale “Granvia” hotels), and began selling transit+hotel package deals to keep customer money under one roof. When the new Hiroshima Airport opened in 1993, JR refused to build any rail link between the airport and the nearby Sanyo Line; the only sane way to get to the airport is by taking a paid limousine bus service from nearby rail terminals in Hiroshima, Fukuyama, and elsewhere.

So yeah, things have been just a little testy… to put it lightly. So for JR West, ANA, and JAL to put something like this out there is kind of a big deal. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d want to set up immediately, right? So why might we be waiting until 2030?

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS (of your booking)

Okay guys: things are about to get nerdy in here.

The biggest issue I assume the airlines and JR will encounter in trying to make one booking platform is that the ones they use now are a cluster of permissions, hoops, and different schemes built to maximize the needs of each company. Much like every other airline and rail company in the world, the advent of computing technology in the 1950s and 1960s led many air, rail, and hotel providers to build their own computerized reservation systems (CRS; also sometimes called a GDS for “global distribution system”) to sell tickets in multiple places. While many western airline and hotels consolidated these abilities into multi-agency CRSs with Tolkien-esque names like Sabre and Amadeus, things ran a little differently in Japan.

With an assist from Hitachi, JNR built their own booking system, MARS, that runs on a proprietary OS to this day. Now operated by JR’s own systems company, MARS remains secure as heck, but getting it to play nice with other booking systems isn’t as simple as uploading a software patch. Moreover, JR is no longer one company but six – and while they all utilize MARS on their back end, to say that they are unified in their approach to promotion and ticketing would be a stretch. For example: it took government involvement and legislation to make IC cards like Suica and Icoca work across systems nationwide. For the more lucrative express services and the Shinkansen, while JR East and JR Hokkaido have mostly combined their online booking platforms (“EKINET”), the other JRs are doing their own thing. Most importantly, JR Tokai/JR Central runs the most lucrative part of the Shinkansen network (the Tokyo to Osaka part), and they like things that way. Among all the JRs, there have been company-limited launches of QR code tickets and other “ticketless” booking options, but nothing close to a unified system… yet.

On the airline side of things, JR and ANA both kept the issuing of domestic flights separate from the systems used to issue international flights for longer than most people expected them to. JR finally wound down its own AXESS booking system a few years ago after integrating it with larger global CRS system Travelport. ANA and their partner airlines have spent the last few years putting their international and domestic booking systems together; the old domestic flight booking system finally goes dark on May 19. Even now, if you go to ANA’s domestic booking site, you have to click to a different site based on whether you are booking tickets for before or after May 19. A lot of the hesitation around these changes stem from customers in Japan having to enter their names not in Japanese, but western letters – a change that does make some travelers nervous, but also explains why all of this has been so complicated until now.

TL; DR: This is going to be complicated, and it’s notable that these companies are putting their differences aside to give this venture a go. The billion-yen question: will it work?

WILL IT WORK?

Maybe! As far as I can see, there are a few things that will really affect how this all goes down:

Mode of Delivery

Will tourists and travelers be able to book everything through the app and then just flash it to get through a gate? While Japanese airports are equipped with QR readers at every gate, what about JR? While some stations are experimenting with the tech, to add additional technology beyond the IC-card enabled gates used by travelers these days might be a bit of a stretch for an agency that’s currently catching hell from locals for a big price hike earlier this year. If I had to guess, I would assume that some kind of integration with the kind of tech used to put IC cards on phones will be the solution – especially since there are finally Android-model phones coming out that enable saving IC cards to a device (a service that Apple users have enjoyed for years at this point). This is going to be the most crucial aspect of this new app service that they’ll need to get right.

This is a JR West project, not JR

This is the big sticking point I see going forward. This app proposal is happening between the airlines and JR West - not the two JRs that most travelers deal with primarily, JR East (=Tokyo Area and all Shinkansens that go north from there) and JR Central (the Shinkansen to Osaka). If JR West is going it alone, are they going to resell tickets on the lines that the other JRs run through some kind of integration with MARS on the back end, or not at all? On that note…

Western Travelers Land in Tokyo

Flights from western countries to Japanese airports outside of Tokyo have been gutted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can get flights to Osaka, Fukuoka, and Nagoya from elsewhere in Asia rather easily, but the west? Forget about it. I imagine that this app may try to offer deals to customers that combine domestic flights from Tokyo-Haneda to Osaka with JR West rail tickets to their destinations (which would be awesome), but will that be enough to snag travelers (especially first timers) away from the gravitational pull of Tokyo?

Taking these last two things into account: how JR West and the airlines plan on addressing the Tokyo aspect of this is going to involve a lot of legwork, deal making, and a few sparkly marketing campaigns. Finally, we get to the seasoned traveler and people who read articles like this one:

Will this app be worth it for the savvy/budget conscious traveler?

Let me be blunt: JR West and JAL have not been that great with their deals and such lately. JR West’s own rail passes have been remarkably bad, and their limitations on faster Shinkansen services (which JR East has none of) aren’t great. JAL has gutted their once-reliable Japan Explorer Pass fare, turning it into little more than a rebrand of the cheapest fares on their regular site. If this app offers convenience, that’ll be amazing, but without the carrot of discounts or specials, I don’t foresee it being a game changer.

As far as ANA is concerned, will this app also offer access to the discount fares on low cost carrier (LCCs) airlines it has ties to, like Air Do, Peach, or Solaseed? If the platform enables access to those, or to JAL’s LCC partners, that would be a fabulous step in the right direction.

IN THE MEANTIME

As things go from here, I think the biggest news we can expect is if this app project can get more support from other companies – especially the other JRs. Until the thing launches, I’m going to be watching to see who (if anyone) jumps on board, what kind of other integrations it will feature, or if any large-scale changes will be announced.

Beyond that, if you want to travel with the kind of people who keep up on this stuff in the service of creating unique and fun trips to Japan, head over to the adventures page. We’re so much better than an app, because we are humans. <3