aitaiJapan

Dear guides,

Let’s start with the good news:

Our homepage has finally gone into service!!

Since the beginning of June 2005 visitors can now choose their favorite guides directly from our website after consulting freely our guide’s profiles.
The service seems to work well. In less than three weeks we received guide requests from a variety of countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Danmark, the U.K. and the U.S.

A total of 12 guides have already been contacted through our system, several among them numerous times.

• Advertising our service

To make our service even better known we started advertising on major Japan related web-pages. Important websites such as www.japan-guide.com and
www.japan-zone.com have accepted to exchange links and banners. We also have an ad running in the google sponsored link section.

We are now contacting other tourism related services to support each other mutually. But this is just a beginning. We are working hard to make our service more public and more easily usable, and to improve the design, lay-out, information and services on our web-page.

• Guides profiles

Currently we have a total of 22 guide profiles available in our guide’s profile section.

However several of our registered guides have not contacted us back to set up their profiles. We highly encourage all of you to send us your guide’s profile information form to get your profile displayed on our website and to get the chance to be chosen as a guide.

Guides can choose anonymity regarding photo, name, job, town or age. Main information to be given is about area, interests, language and availability.
Guides don’t need to display any email address or personal data. All incoming requests are first checked by aitaiJapan before being forwarded to the respective guide.

• Accept or decline guide requests

Guides can choose to answer or not to the guide request. If a guide is not available for a guide activity he/she can choose to ignore the guide request or to send directly an email to the visitor to decline politely. In case a guide decides to answer to the visitor all further arrangements should be done exclusively between the visitors and the guide. aitaiJapan can not do all the communications between the guides and the visitors.

However if you have a doubt, question or problem feel free contact us at any time!

• Guide report

We would like to remind you not to forget to send us the guide report after each guide activity for our statistics (to get the permission for the registration of our association at the ward office). Information can be kept to a minimum, but we urgently ask you to send us back the report. You can download the form on　www.aitaijapan.com/guides/forms

• Special services

When entering our web-site you will notice a button called “special services” on the upper menu. Guides can use this section to propose more organized and more defined activities.

Three activities are available for the moment:

• Help for electronics shopping
• “Yuka dinner” by the Kamogawa in Kyoto
• One-day-trip to Arashiyama.

The Arashiyama trip proves particularly popular, as visitors seem to find some interests in visiting spots outside the main tourist attractions inside the town. Also visitors seem to appreciate to have their visit organized in advance.

This section is free to all of our members, including to those who don’t want to display their profile.

To improve the efficiency of our association, we want to encourage you to set up your own special service. Anything you would like to show or to teach to tourists, anything YOU love particularly about Japan. This can be a visit of a famous tourist spot or something more unusual such as visiting a kendo performance or climbing Fuji-san.

You can for example offer a home visit or even a home-stay, a Karaoke tour, a tour into food sections of big department stores which are very fascinating for foreigners, a cooking class, a tea ceremony demonstration, an Ikebana or Kimono wearing class. You can suggest a trip to the country side, a visit to your friend’s house, a visit to a pottery village or interesting restaurants in town.

You can show tourists around shopping malls or bring them to a popular kaiten sushi.
You can help out with souvenir or arts shopping or negotiating prices at the local flea market.

There is no limit to your imagination.

Once you have described your activity (evt. with photo), we will set up your service on our website. Once again you can choose to stay anonymous and you don’t need to display private information, such as your email address. Also you can choose to ignore a guide request if you don’t want to do the guide activity. Please contact us if you need help or if you have questions.

We appreciate very much your contribution to make our service more popular and attractive.

• Help needed

We are also still desperately looking for supporting members or just people who can help out a little with their ideas or active help.

The most time consuming and at the same time the most important task to make our service run is advertising.

There are especially three areas in which we greatly need help:

• advertising our service to reach visitors
• advertising our service to find more guides, especially in areas outside the main tourist spots.
• negotiating exchange of links/banners with major Japan related websites.

Advertising can be done by flyers and leaflets in hotels, information centers, youth hostels, community centers, international houses etc., but the main part of advertising goes through the Internet. We need people who can simply renew ads once a week or once a month or who can help to find out advertising possibilities.
Simple suggestions for advertising opportunities are also useful. Any help is very much welcome.

Also suggestions of interesting links are very welcome. Just send us the web address of interesting websites related to Japan. To get some inspiration, have a look at our link list. www.aitaijapan.com/japan It is still very small. You can help us to make it richer!

Please also check the supporting member’s section on our homepage to get some ideas where help is needed www.aitaijapan.com/guides/supporting_members

Finally all suggestions to improve our website and our service are highly appreciated.

• Divers:

We had our first guide meeting in Osaka on Mai 29th. 12 members joined the meeting with a little Izakaya-party later in the evening.

We wish you a happy summer with lots of great guide opportunities.

Hope to hear from you soon

Dagmar Franzen and Takashige Takegoshi

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aitaiJapan Newsletter #1 April 2005

How have you been doing recently?
Spring has finally come, the weather is getting sunny and bright. It’s a perfect season for enjoying nature, sight-seeing or doing other outdoor activities.
We hope you have the chance to fully enjoy this beautiful season.

In our first newsletter we would like to give you some information about our association:

With the beginning of the new season aitaiJapan is also preparing to fully enter into service. We started our association in November 2004 with a small team of 3 or 4 volunteer members. These ambitious volunteers set up a nation-wide volunteer service to help foreign tourists traveling in Japan and to give an opportunity to Japanese people to get into contact with people from countries from all over the world.
We wanted this service to be free for everyone, so that even the most cost conscious budget travelers could enjoy.

So far our idea has worked out well.

… about our guides

We are now a group of about 30 volunteer guides, mostly in the Kansai and Kanto areas and with a few in other areas as well.

… about visitors

In total we had requests from visitors from different countries such as America, Australia, Canada, New-Zealand, France, Germany, India, Thailand, Indonesia and many others.

This is very encouraging considering the fact that for the moment we only advertise within Japan.

Unfortunately many request are for areas where we don’t have guides yet, including areas such as Hokkaido or Okinawa.

Some of our guides, especially the Kansai guides, have not been contacted yet for guide activities. This is due to the fact that we have more requests for the Kanto area and, curiously many requests for other areas outside the main tourist spots. Another reason is that many visitors are looking for guides who can guide them on weekdays, but most of our guides are mainly available on Saturdays or Sundays. Kansai guides please do not be disappointed, opportunities will come as the word spreads. We appreciate your patience.

… about our homepage

We announced that our homepage would be operational from April 2005, but there has been a delay due to some unexpected technical problems.

When our homepage will be finally operational, we will be able to advertise more. We hope this will result in an increase in demands for guides. For the moment we beg you to be patient for some, until we can resolve all our problems. We are all volunteers contributing to the association in our (much limited) free time.

… about the new guide selection system

We are thinking about introducing a new guide selection procedure that will be more democratic and fair for our guides and more interesting and easy to use for the visitors.

We will send you more detailed information about this new service very soon.

… guide meeting Kansai

We planned our first meeting for Kansai guides for Sunday, Mai 29 in Osaka.
Details about the time and place will be sent to you very soon.

We hope to meet as many among you as possible to exchange ideas, experiences and to get to know each other.

• Special thanks:

We would like to give our special thanks the following supporting members for all the time and energy they dedicate to help setting up our association:

Patrice Houlet: for setting up the homepage, for many practical advice and encouragements.

Masayoshi Otani: for supporting our association financially and for helping out with useful ideas and promotion.

Ramon Greenner: for his quick and efficient proofreading and useful advice.

Dagmar Franzen and Takashige Takegoshi

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