Co-founder Yasu Kanno shares his insight on eight years of growth, and remaining true to the company’s core ethos of enriching and engaging walking tours, where storytelling is a central tenet of its offering.
Tokyo is at once full of vibrant traditional cultures and a hive of information. One of the best ways to get the best of both is with a walking tour, delivered with passion, relaying the history that makes the city such a draw for cultural tourism. It’s something Arumachi, Inc. made its mission eight years ago. “We started as a business in 2018, and from the very beginning, our company has been focused on walking tours in historical or traditional areas of Tokyo,” says its co-founder Yasu Kanno.
Arumachi launched English-language walking tours for international tourists, advertised in leaflets at city hotels. Demand quickly grew, though, when the business discovered the value of OTAs – most notably GetYourGuide. This helped Arumachi attract travelers to the city and make its marketing and operations slicker and better integrated.
Just under a decade later, more than 2,000 people join its tours every year. These tours encompass the traditional sights of Asakusa and Tokyo’s other historic neighborhoods, as well as sumo wrestling shows, traditional tsugaru shamisen performances, and more.
“100% of our customers are international,” says Yasu. “About 60% of the customers come from the United States, 15% come from Australia, 20% from Europe, and the rest come from Southeast Asia. So without OTAs, we don't have hands and feet; without OTAs, we cannot reach any of our customers.”
Here, Yasu discusses growing a business with OTAs at the center of its strategy, and how insights from the GetYourGuide platform have helped it thrive.
What is the mission statement for Arumachi, Inc.?
We need to give three values to our customers. The first one is fun; we need to make sure our customers have fun when they experience our tours. The second, after the tour, they should realize they’ve learned a lot. The third is that they feel that they have had a meaningful time.
When we fulfill these three goals, we feel that customers enjoy the tour, and they are satisfied. That perception is most of the time reflected in the reviews we receive on GetYourGuide.
What is at the heart of what Arumachi offers?
To the east of the Imperial Palace, a former castle, we have a historic district called Asakusa. There, you can find Tokyo's oldest temple and its most iconic landmark, Sensō-ji Temple. I think most people have seen the photo of its big red lantern, which is a symbol of Tokyo sightseeing. That's a huge asset for our tours in that area.
Our basic tenet is that we always discuss the story behind what we actually see. That is our motto and what we want to provide to customers. Some guides at other companies just explain what they're seeing, but our guides narrate the history behind each landmark. Our guides tell stories.
The challenge we're facing is that it's sometimes hard for us to convey our offerings to our customers at a glance. When they join our tours, they can immediately see the difference in our offering compared to others, so the challenge is how we can better communicate that difference. It's something we aim to resolve within the next couple of years.
When you started out, did you work with OTAs like GetYourGuide from the beginning?
We built our relationship with GetYourGuide several years ago, but not from the very beginning. We started a partnership with another OTA, then we became aware that GetYourGuide was very effective, so we decided to partner with them.
When we started this business, we tried to reach international customers who were staying in hotels. We talked with hotel staff and asked them to keep our brochures so that their guests could take a look at them. At the time, though, travelers were already almost 100% dependent on the internet to look for tours and experiences. This paper method didn't work, so we quickly switched to partnering with OTAs. They are now indispensable for reaching our customers. It is a valuable tool in our marketing strategy.
How does GetYourGuide compare with other OTAs you work with?
I really like GetYourGuide. When we build tours on the platform, the configuration suits our demands well. We can include a summary of the tour, which is very important, customers want to understand what an experience is about within seconds. We can also add highlights, and write full descriptions of up to 3,000 characters. which is fantastic because some OTAs limit the number of characters to just 500. For us, that feels like trying to talk to people with our mouths muzzled.
I think another benefit of GetYourGuide's platform is that all the reviews are from people who have actually joined a tour. So it's a real, verified review, it's not hearsay. That’s very useful for building a solid foundation. We cannot build anything on shaky ground.
How has customer insight from GetYourGuide helped tailor what your business offers?
What is very helpful to us is that the GetYourGuide platform provides our conversion rate, which is important because it shows the percentage of people who actually buy our tour.
Our close relationship with GetYourGuide Japan has also been valuable. They share insights on things like pages with high views but low conversions, which helps us understand where we're losing potential customers and why.
Conversion rate tells us how effective our presentation is, so we pay close attention to it. If you're open to using what the platform offers, a partnership with OTAs – and especially GetYourGuide – is very useful, and the value for the time put in is legitimate.
What are your plans for the next few years?
One challenge we're facing is a shift in market trends. Sumo is very popular, but securing tickets is getting increasingly tough, and we've been heavily dependent on those tours. Over the next couple of years, we'll need to transition from sumo-dependent tours to other offerings — which will be challenging.
That said, we do want to scale, and while our tours are mostly focused on culture and history, we're seeing other opportunities. Specifically, manga and anime — a subculture that is very Japanese and very popular. When we ask younger travelers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s why they chose Japan, many say, "I really like manga and anime." They want to experience Japan as its birthplace. So subcultural tours are one of our key focus areas for the next two to three years.
We don't intend to stay where we are; we want to evolve into other areas.
Key takeaways
- Stay true to your mission. Arumachi’s tours are marked by their commitment to telling the stories and relaying the rich history of Tokyo’s traditional neighborhoods, with guides whose enthusiasm is a key selling point. As the business has grown, this has remained central to Arumachi’s offering.
- Embrace OTAs to reach customers. When early in-person marketing initiatives like leaflets struggled to convert, it was partnerships with OTA platforms, especially GetYourGuide, that allowed Arumachi to reach an international audience of tourists visiting Tokyo.
- Communicate in long and short form. Arumachi has found great value in using GetYourGuide’s platform to provide a full, rich description of its experiences, free from the strict character limits of some OTAs. The summary tool complements this by relaying key information to potential customers at a glance.
- Make use of GetYourGuide’s data. Ample room for descriptions of Arumachi’s tours is something the business has found invaluable in the GetYourGuide platform, as well as shorter highlights to get them across at a glance. Data, including conversion rates for various tours, has also been paramount in tailoring its offerings.
- Adapt to new trends. While the supply of sumo tickets struggles to keep up with demand, Arumachi is keen to explore tour offerings focused on manga and anime, harnessing the popularity of a Japanese export in international markets.
