Abstract— Although inbound tourists have been increasing sharply in Japan, accommodation facilities are insufficient. In this study, qualitative analysis was conducted to examine the cases of 26 Japanese ryokans and hotels acclaimed highly by foreign guests. As a result, their efforts in 1) multilingual support, 2) rooms, 3) sufficient shared spaces, 4) interactions with other people, 5) Japanese cultural experience events and 6) meals were identified. These characteristics were then sorted from the two-axis combination perspectives, hard/soft and global/Japanese. The results show that the dissatisfaction level of foreign guests has decreased through having wider rooms and shared spaces, as well as multilingual support by ICT, whereas the satisfaction level has increased by promoting interactions with other guests and local Japanese people, offering events of Japanese experience and having Japanese style facilities and gardens.


Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.