JNTO Honored With Travalliance Award

Above, Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo.  Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The January issue (no. 98) of Agent@Home magazine cited the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) as the "Best Pacific-Asia Country Bureau" in their 2012 Travalliance Leisure Travel Leaders Awards.

They said:

It is gratifying to see travAlliancemedia readers recognize the incredible job that the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) did to revive its tourism from the March 2011 triple-headed catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant radiation leakage. 

In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, arrivals dropped 57 percent.  Despite that utter collapse, the JNTO and its partners through a carefully coordinated crisis management campaign were able to deliver 7.99 million arrivals for 2011, which doesn't compare badly at all to 2010's 8.45 million. 

This past June, the JNTO could report that travel to Japan was within 5 percent of what it was before the March 2011 disasters. 

These days, the JNTO is relieved to doing battle with a more familiar adversary, a strong yen.

The travAlliancemedia Leisure Travel Leaders Awards are based on a poll of their entire travel agent readership base, including more than 65,000 readers of TravelPulse.com, the more than 30,000 readers of Vacation Agent magazine and the more than 20,000 readers of Agent@Home magazine

. 

They also asked their readers to give them a write-in vote based on their perception of the service provided to them and their clients by travel suppliers and destinations.

Agent@Home magazine is a monthly publication by travAlliancemedia and is geared towards home-based travel agents.