Tourism is the largest industry in the world .
I heard that one of the reasons for starting this business was Mr. Maezawa's advice to do what you love to do. Once again, please tell us how you got started.
. If I were to do it next, I wanted to be in the hotel or architecture business, which I like. . Moreover, tourism is a very big business and has a large market. Tourism is the largest business in the world in terms of GDP share. . yet there are not many start-up companies in the industry. I thought that Japan's good points could be better communicated, and that luxury hotels could be built in better places in Japan. We partnered with the city of Miyazaki in 2017 for the land to build NOT A HOTEL's Miyazaki property. We've been working on the project ever since, but the bank has been very reluctant to lend us money.
. The smallest rooms in Miyazaki can be as large as 120 square meters. . Because of this, it is difficult for banks to lend money. . When I thought about who might be willing to lend money, I thought it might be the owner who buys the property. So, out of the situation of not being able to lend money, we came up with the "NOT A HOTEL" service as a bitter pill to swallow. If by any chance they had lent us the money, it would have been called "THE HOTEL," which would have been a completely different service (laughs).
In another article, you said that the hotel industry is a lap or two behind in digitalization...?
By lagging behind, I mean that the investment is extremely low. The hotel industry market is worth 2 trillion yen, but the scale of the system is very small, with only about 20 billion yen spent on it . People ask me, "Why don't you make a system for hotels? But the scale is so small... . . For our part, we don't want to go there, but we are thinking of doing it more vertically.
Do you think that in the hotel industry, there are always people first?
You know those mini-bars (refrigerators) that come with every hotel room? You know, the ones where you keep track of how many sodas you have had? In the case of "NOT A HOTEL," each drink is tagged with an RFID tag, so everything can be managed automatically. We are trying to solve various inconveniences in hotels with technology.
. If we push forward with that, we won't even need a concierge, will we?
. what I ask the hotel front desk is the same thing over 90%. For example, what time is breakfast? or , Do you have a charger for my iPhone? . . and so on. . I wonder if it's a good idea to have a person on duty 24 hours a day just to solve those questions. I think it would be better to leave that to an automated chatbot and enhance the service for that amount of time. So the idea is not to reduce the number of people, but to use machines to do things that can be done by anyone. We are in the process of developing "NOT A HOTEL," aiming to improve rooms and amenities to the extent that common areas are eliminated, and we are spending money in such areas. For example, lobbies have a history of being made more and more expensive and luxurious because they are places where people have to wait. . So, if we use technology to keep people from waiting, it would be okay to omit that part.
The more I listen to you , the more I realize that you have thought this through very well.
I don't think "Airbnb" controls the experience inside the home . . We don't think of ourselves as hotel makers, but as home makers. We think about living in the house, but we also think about relationships so that owners can easily communicate with each other when renting out the house. We are a home builder , a hotel builder. . We feel that we are not creating a platform, but a product.
