The Japanese Travel Life Cycle

Summary This paper offers an alternative way of segmenting a non-western travel market, namely, the Japanese outbound market. The segmentation schema comprises several institutionalised forms of travel likely to be undertaken by a Japanese individual in the course of his or her life. Coined the ‘travel life cycle,' the concept fits Japanese society well due to the highly organized and group-oriented patterns of travel that have emerged over the past one hundred years. While this form of segmentation is unlikely to be usefully applied to western travel markets, its application in the Japanese context may suggest that it has relevance when examining the travel patterns of other tradition-bound and group-oriented Asian travel markets such as Korea, China or Indonesia. The paper's conceptual contribution lies in the implicit suggestion that particular cultures may develop and exhibit unique forms of consumption behavior that lie outside the conceptual framework normally adopted by western academics and marketing practitioners. Manageri-ally, the paper suggests ways by which tourism operators and tourism promotion bodies can more efficiently and effectively target Japanese travellers according to the stage of travel life cycle.