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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