What we need to do to make Japan the country of choice for first-time international travelers…

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

Our company develops new online services around the concept of ICT meets travel. Our current focus is the private accommodation matching website STAY JAPAN, a service that we urgently want to extend to the ever-increasing number of international tourists visiting our country. But we didn’t know how best to reach tourists coming to Japan from South-east Asia, the region that we plan to target next. Overseas travel is still not widespread in that region. In preparation for future economic development, we wanted to take steps to encourage travelers to choose Japan for their first trip overseas. Also, when catering to consumers from other countries, it is necessary to hire the best talent, regardless of nationality. That’s another reason why we applied for this program: we thought it was important to create a company culture where personnel from other countries are completely accepted and integrated, and to reduce any sense of resistance to new personnel whose culture or language differ from our own.

They made suggestions on how to improve the service, arranged for influential foreign celebrities to visit Japan, taught English lessons to the staff, and more!

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

He had the interns use STAY JAPAN to experience a stay in a typical Japanese home for themselves and provide us with feedback. They were unsure at first since it was their first time to book any kind of accommodation online, but in the end they were able to offer us concrete suggestions about how to improve the service from their fresh perspective as visitors to our country. They later wrote articles about their experience which they shared in their countries, which also helped promote the service. We also consulted them about our plan of having popular celebrities from their countries use STAY JAPAN and post about their experience back home, with the aim of promoting Japan as a destination as well as our private accommodation service. Our Japanese staff had no idea who was famous or influential in Vietnam or Indonesia, but the interns took care of everything from choosing the celebrities to making appointments and arranging the visits. We could never have achieved that without their help. One issue we faced was how to involve the rest of our staff. We addressed this by sharing the interns’ daily reports with the whole staff and allowing them to give feedback. We also held workshops so that we could understand each other better, and had the interns teach English lessons twice a week. Even though our entire staff is made up of engineers, I think that these initiatives gradually helped bring everyone closer.

They helped bring national celebrities with about 400,000 social media followers to Japan, promoting our service and leading directly to a boost in sales…

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

The biggest achievement was getting influential celebrities from Vietnam and Indonesia with 400,000 and 40,000 social media followers each to visit Japan, experience a stay in a Japanese home, and share their experience online. I don’t know whether it was because their common background made communication easier, but I was honestly astounded that they were able to get from the initial contact to the celebrities’ actual arrival in Japan in just two months. In exchange for nothing more than an all-expenses-paid one week trip to Japan, the celebrities agreed to come here and promote the country and the experience of staying in a Japanese home to audiences in their country. Having celebrities endorse our service had a direct impact on sales, and gave us a renewed sense of the potential interest in Japan as a travel destination. Another benefit was the concrete advice that we got from the interns based on their experience staying at a Japanese home. For example, they gave us lots of useful new suggestions regarding our plan to make the service more accessible to Muslim visitors, such as the idea of providing maps showing where to find mosques and restaurants that serve halal food, and of setting up separate prayer spaces for male and female guests. They gave us concrete suggestions on how our service could better meet the needs of tourists from their countries, which we have incorporated to our benefit. The third effect of the internship was that our staff were able to develop their ability to work with people from other cultures. Our staff normally only work with other Japanese, and they had little real sense of the point of view of consumers in other countries. Thanks to the advice the interns gave us and the actions they took to promote cross-cultural understanding, I think that there has been a gradual shift in our staff’s mentality.