Vacation rental sites like Airbnb were slow to make their way to the country, but have now become the accommodation of choice for many people doing Japan on a budget. Tujia, a Beijing-based operator of one such website, launched a Japan unit about a year ago targeting the growing numbers of Chinese tourists.
Tujia began the service in December 2011. It now offers accommodation in 335 cities domestically, as well as some 450,000 rooms in 67 countries and regions overseas, including Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Singapore.
The operator does not disclose booking figures, but if the number of available rooms on its website is anything to go by, the figure must be growing. The site now has some 5,000 rooms in Japan alone, and the amount has almost doubled in the past three months.
The content on Tujia's website is written mostly in Chinese, including the user reviews and comments. This eliminates a common hurdle with Airbnb and other Western booking websites, which have the language as an option but it is often only used for information about rooms in China.
U.S. company Airbnb has led the way for short-term lodgings in Japan, with more than 50,000 rooms in the country. Slowly but surely, Tujia is gaining ground, largely by focusing on a market that accounts for more than 20% of foreign visitors to Japan.
