aitaiJapan

Dear guides,

May the New Year bring you happiness!

Aitaijapan has survived a whole year without any complications in 2009. I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for your kind hospitality towards our foreign guests.

In 2009, there were approximately 70 guide requests, with visitors from Europe (U.K, Italy, Spain, France, etc), the USA, Canada, Australia, and Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, China, etc ). Most of the guide requests were for Tokyo, then next to Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka. Many visitors visited Hida Takayama and Shirakawa-Go after Tokyo, and then they visited Hiroshima after the Kansai area last year. Unfortunately, we do not have any guides in these areas yet, so please let me know if you have any friends or acquaintances who may be interested in being guides for these areas.

The most wonderful news of 2009 was that our website aitaijapan.com was published in a travel column in the New York Times last June. Although it was a small article, it was an extremely pleasant surprise for us. In addition, we had a great number of requests from individuals from the USA throughout summer. I regard that it must have been owed to your kind hospitality attitudes.

Furthermore, I have uploaded the member’s communication site SNS http://aitaijapan.so-netsns.jp/ as a way for us to communicate and know each other better. I encourage that all members use this site as a tool to communicate frankly with one another, and to discuss any issues or ideas about aitaijapan. I absolutely wish our website, aitaijapan.com to establish itself on the world wide web more than ever and feel that we can do so with the help from your comments and suggestions.

Finally, please don’t forget to ask to send the visitor’s comments handout to your customers, and also please send in your guide reports after each tour.

I hope that 2010 will greet you all with warm encounters and rich experiences through aitaijapan.

With kind regards,

Yoshiko Nakakura
Aitaijapan.com coordinator

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