The tourism industry is currently facing a serious shortage of workers and needs to develop talented human resources. Workers in this industry, particularly those in hospitality need good interaction skills to ensure customer satisfaction. Thus, communication is one of the vital competencies for workers in this sector. This study aims to break down the elements of hospitality communication and present them in the form of Can-Do statements. Codes extracted from a previous study are used to draft Can-Do items and descriptors. Then, interviews are conducted with seven hotel staff, and the interview data were analyzed to improve the Can-Do statements related to hospitality communication. We report the process and rationale for changes made to the statements for improvement. Further, some of the important elements on the statements are explained and discussed to support the detailed description of the items. These statements would be a useful checklist for training the workforce in the hospitality sector.

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It is important for creating a travel-friendly environment to consider old people and young children, who have many issues when traveling. In this study, the attitudes of mothers with infants and toddlers toward travel before and after the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed using data from mamari, which is a smartphone application for mothers to solve and share questions and concerns about pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare. Latent Dirichlet allocation topic models were constructed for the data, which were user question sentences written in Japanese. Thus, the attitudes of mothers toward travel were investigated using the topic model analysis.

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The world economy has suffered great damage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. China and North Korea enforced some strict infection control measures and ‘zero-COVID strategy’ is adhered, which limits human behavior including interactions. Although Japan is a little loosely regulated, the economic situation is becoming tougher and Japan is turning to a ‘living with COVID strategy’, which is adopted in Western countries. Also, accepting measures of visitors for sightseeing purposes are being relaxed in Japan to avoid becoming a tourism isolated country. It is important that the trade volume does not stagnate more than anything. The following questionnaire survey is being conducted with foreigners entering Japan, namely choosing one of three categories (sightseeing, business, others) as the visiting purpose. The relationship between the number of visitors who chose the business-category as the visiting purpose and the total trade is examined in this paper. As a result, it is recognized that there is a relationship, except when COVID-19 is widespread, and also there is especially a correlation between the number of visitors for business from China, USA, Taiwan and Thailand (except for South Korea) and the total trade of those countries, and it can be indicated using a simple linear regression. Total trade could be understood to be unaffected largely by the outbreak of infectious disease. The increase or decrease of visitors for business could be predicted using the simple regression equation in normal time.

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Japan is in the process of a long-term population decline, and there are concerns that the domestic tourism will shrink due to this population decline. However, as the population of people over 65 years old is estimated to increase until around 2042, the elderly are an important segment of the tourism industry. The number of trips by age group is below average for those aged 70 and older. Health reasons are reported as a disincentive to travel for this age group, which is higher than for other age groups, as is the desire not to be troubled by the inability to keep up with the pace of others. The authors are carrying out research on the derivation of tourism activity ability to promote tourism among the elderly. As part of this study, a preliminary experiment of sightseeing tours was conducted and the fatigue level during sightseeing activities was evaluated by objective and subjective indices. Furthermore, this paper discusses the relationship between the degree of fatigue and the amount of daily activity. From these results, it is possible to obtain the beginning stages of deriving tourism activity ability of the elderly.

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The problem of sleep deprivation has become a global concern. People in Japan, in particular, sleep the least of all OECD countries. Many East Asian countries are sleep deprived, therefore, it is necessary to consider measures to address the problem of sleep in Asia. It has been pointed out that better awakening and waking time is good sleep. Today, many people are stressed about waking up, therefore, there is a need to build an environment that allows people to comfortably transition to a waking state. In hotels as well, companies pursuing high-quality sleep and wake-up services are attracting attention. This study aims to develop a wake-up support method and service that can support comfortable awakening according to individual characteristics.

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In recent years, the declining birthrate and aging population have been accelerating in Japan. Municipalities need to utilize data and provide evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) to maintain and improve the quality of resident services with limited resources and financial resources. Therefore, we aim to utilize open image data for tourism appeal in local governments through industry-government-academia collaboration. Currently, the utilization of open image data is not progressing in local governments due to problems such as portrait rights and privacy of images. Therefore, we transfer the image data style, consider the anonymization of the image, and aim to utilize it for tourism. Also, we verified the image style transfer results through demonstration experiments in a local government. As a result, this study demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach to local government image data. We believe that this will lead to the utilization of open image data. Furthermore, we aim to deepen the understanding of artificial intelligence technology and the utilization of images in local governments.

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In an aging society with a declining birthrate, increasing travel opportunities for the elderly will lead to increased revenue in the tourism industry, but simultaneously, consideration must be given to fatigue and injuries caused by unperceived fatigue. Therefore, this paper focuses on walking. Recently, the measurement of gait and analysis of gait data have been widely studied. However, most of the studies that analyze gait are aimed at understanding the health status of walkers, and there are few studies that accurately measure the degree of fatigue of the body. In this study, we developed a device to measure gait data to analyze the degree of body fatigue, and to verify a method to quantify the degree of fatigue. The device was created with a sensor that measures pressure on the sole of the foot and an IMU. The gait data were analyzed using t-SNE and SVM. From the experiment, we could classify the gait data and determine the degree of fatigue. It is expected that this device will be able to detect fatigue during sightseeing.

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The following research reveals macabre tourism and the characteristics that define the concept, as well as the motivation of tourists who like to visit such strange places. In this context, there is an exemplification that over the years have left irreparable events and others somewhat strange and bizarre. The research is of a documentary approach, that is, it is the investigative method based on the revision of texts, articles, bibliographies, videos, films, among others, already existing on a topic and that can be used to start or bring up a topic. already discussed, the objective is based on two guidelines; The first is to know the concept of macabre tourism and the affection on the part of tourists in practicing this activity, and second, the central element of the study, the presentation of the places considered as dark tourism in Japan: The Aokigahara Suicide Forest and the village of the dolls: Nagoro. Finally, characteristics, antecedents, among other relevant aspects, in addition to the geographical location of the places, which are considered macabre tourist attractions, are disclosed. It follows that the popularity of these sites has aroused the interest of foreign and local tourists to explore these places in Japan.

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