It is the great lottery of the plane ticket or the train ticket. Peach, a small airline low-cost, first tested this concept in Japan, which was then taken up by the country’s major railway companies: JR East and JR West. It is a question of paying a fixed price, very cheap compared to the price of the usual tickets: for the Shinkansen, it is the Japanese TGV, the mystery round trip is offered at only 5,000 yen, i.e. say barely 35 euros.
You enter, in a special application, your departure station –Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya – and you give your departure and arrival dates. Then, a sort of digital dice appears on the screen, starts spinning and you discover your mystery destination! The companies have only put important tourist sites in their big lotteries. You will not be sent to an industrial zone, in the middle of nowhere.
These new lotteries are very popular because they are very economical. Shinkansen tickets are usually very expensive in Japan. There are no reduced prices for families or certain categories of the population as in France. For some, it is therefore a unique opportunity to afford a trip a little far. You pay a fixed price of 5,000 yen but you can win tickets that are normally worth two or three times that amount. JR West ensures that the minimum saving is at least 43%, so all participants are winners!
Thanks to this concept, companies are finally filling their trains and planes. The Japanese have drastically reduced their leisure trips because of the Covid. There has never been a quarantine here but people are extremely cautious. Even today, everyone still wears the mask in the street, at the beach or in the mountains. And, of course, they limit visits to grandparents or friends. Local transport demand has dropped and there are no foreign tourists, as the country has been completely closed since April 2020. Japan has only recently started accepting foreign visitors again. Provided they go through approved travel agencies.