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Japanese inn booking site Relux surpasses 100,000 members, announces China expansion

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese luxury inn and hotel booking site Relux was launched in February 2013 in beta followed by a switch to an official edition in April of the same year. Members had to obtain qualification by Relux to start booking inns using the site, but the regulation was subsequently abolished in late 2013. Loco Partners, the company behind the service, announced on Friday that it has surpassed 100,000 registered members since its launch almost two years ago. See also: Japan’s Relux raises $3.1 million, enhances hotel booking site to meet foreigner needs What’s unique about Relux is that their screening committee chose Japanese hotels or inns from all across the country, aiming to give users a satisfaction-guaranteed staying experience. In addition to listing high-end Japanese inns, Relux provides member-only limited packages in association with participating hotels and inns. As their user base grew, booking inquiries from outside Japan have also increased. While many people from Hong Kong, China, and Singapore now use Relux for booking their stays, some of them pay even millions yen a night for a luxury accommodation package. Based on these responses from users, Relux has enhanced and improved their services to…

relux-hotel
Bettei Senjuan, Gunma, Japan

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese luxury inn and hotel booking site Relux was launched in February 2013 in beta followed by a switch to an official edition in April of the same year. Members had to obtain qualification by Relux to start booking inns using the site, but the regulation was subsequently abolished in late 2013. Loco Partners, the company behind the service, announced on Friday that it has surpassed 100,000 registered members since its launch almost two years ago.

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What’s unique about Relux is that their screening committee chose Japanese hotels or inns from all across the country, aiming to give users a satisfaction-guaranteed staying experience. In addition to listing high-end Japanese inns, Relux provides member-only limited packages in association with participating hotels and inns.

As their user base grew, booking inquiries from outside Japan have also increased. While many people from Hong Kong, China, and Singapore now use Relux for booking their stays, some of them pay even millions yen a night for a luxury accommodation package. Based on these responses from users, Relux has enhanced and improved their services to better fit foreign visitors to Japan. As part of these efforts, they launched the global edition of its booking site last September, followed by launching a multilingual concierge service and an English version of their Facebook fan page.

Since Loco Partners has been receiving many inquiries, in particular from China, they are planning to launch a local office in China in March to explore local partners, aimed atxbetter serving Chinese user needs. Towards the Chinese new year holiday later this month, the company started a time-limited promotional campaign on Friday, offering a complimentary travel voucher worth 10,000 yen to foreigners who sign up fully for a Relux membership, until 11:59pm of 18th February (Thursday), Japan Time.

The Japan National Tourism Organization announced that more than 13.41 million foreign visitors have visited Japan through last year, which was a 29.4% increase from the previous year, the highest ever figure. Since typical foreign visitors to Japan must rely on conventional online booking sites like TripAdvisor or Hotels.com due to language barrier, it is only natural that Relux is so attractive for them because of its highly-selected curation of Japanese hotels and inns.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Relux: A satisfaction-guaranteed online marketplace for Japanese inns

Yukari Mitsuhashi Yukari Mitsuhashi
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Many Japanese traditional-style inns, or ‘ryokan’, are known for their fine hospitality. And with the goal of helping you find the best ones, Relux, a high-class ryokan discovery service launched in beta back in February. It’s an initiative from Tokyo-based startup Loco Partners, who have so far secured 60 million yen (about $615,000) in funding from CyberAgent Ventures and Recruit Incubation Partners. There are existing websites that allows users to find and reserve different accomodations such as Jyaran or Rakuten Travel. And there are others that are geared more towards high-class hotels like Ikkyu. So what makes Relux different? Relux, whose name is a portmanteau of ‘relax’ and ‘luxury’, differentiates itself in three major ways: First, it is strictly a members-only service, with users in their 30s to 40s, many being doctors, lawyers, and top executives. Users apply for the membership using their Facebook credentials, when the site seems to extract information such as your college and career experiences from Facebook. The membership acceptance rate is somewhere around 20%. Another differentiator is that Relux guarantees the best rate for all offers they make on the site (in comparison to competitors). Relux also claims satisfation guaranteed (i.e. money back for dissatisfied customers)…

relux-toppage

Many Japanese traditional-style inns, or ‘ryokan’, are known for their fine hospitality. And with the goal of helping you find the best ones, Relux, a high-class ryokan discovery service launched in beta back in February. It’s an initiative from Tokyo-based startup Loco Partners, who have so far secured 60 million yen (about $615,000) in funding from CyberAgent Ventures and Recruit Incubation Partners.

There are existing websites that allows users to find and reserve different accomodations such as Jyaran or Rakuten Travel. And there are others that are geared more towards high-class hotels like Ikkyu. So what makes Relux different?

Relux, whose name is a portmanteau of ‘relax’ and ‘luxury’, differentiates itself in three major ways:

  1. First, it is strictly a members-only service, with users in their 30s to 40s, many being doctors, lawyers, and top executives. Users apply for the membership using their Facebook credentials, when the site seems to extract information such as your college and career experiences from Facebook. The membership acceptance rate is somewhere around 20%.
  2. Another differentiator is that Relux guarantees the best rate for all offers they make on the site (in comparison to competitors).
  3. Relux also claims satisfation guaranteed (i.e. money back for dissatisfied customers) and they say they are the first in the travel industry to have such a policy.

I had a chance to talk to the founder of Relux, Takaya Shinozuka, who elaborated on how the system works.

Our staff negotiates with ryokan to create exclusive travel plans for Relux. The average rate per person per night is 40,000 yen including dinner and breakfast. Our plans start from a minimum of 30,000 yen to 100,000 yen at the high end. What distiguishes Relux from other luxury travel discovery sites is that only we provide ‘high-satisfaction’ ryokan instead of just high-class ryokan.

The review of hotels takes into account recommendations by executives who use such accomodations more than 100 times a year, as well as thorough research of online and offline reviews, and actual usage or a visit by a Relux representative.

Only two months after its launch, the site is focused on gaining more members and increasing the number of ryokan available on the site. Relux hopes to introduce around 200 ryokans per year. Shinozuka adds:

It is amazing how many wonderful ryokans there are not just in Tokyo but all over Japan. It is our mission to spread the word about such culture first to the Japanese people but hopefully to the world in the near future. To that end, we will definitely release an English version of Relux at some point.

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