Japan Airlines , Senior Vice President, Route Marketing, Ross Leggett at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Asia 2026
Japan Airlines , Senior Vice President, Route Marketing, Ross Leggett spoke to CAPA TV at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Asia 2026, hosted in Hokkaido, Japan, about the latest industry trends and company developments.
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Transcript
Ross Leggett:The inbound market in general has— I think there's been a slight dip in August and July, but the biggest decrease has been coming from China market. So if we take China away from the overall picture, then I think we're on track or nearly the same as last year. And in some months it's increasing. So we're still confident that the inbound market is holding up. There seems to be a trend that Japan is not as popular in summer. I think that people perceive Japan as being too hot in summer. Well, that's what our social media looks like at the moment. So that might have had some impact on this summer. We think overall the inbound Japan is still very, very strong. And the government initiative for 60 million by 2030. Okay, they have to make adjustments for China, I guess, but overall I think it's still on track and achievable. The conflict in the Middle East has— first of all, we have decided to suspend our Doha route until March of next year, till next summer, which is a very difficult decision, but we just couldn't see the stability that we needed in the next 6 months. Having said that, demand between Japan and Europe has become quite strong. So there was a big market via the Middle East that's now looking at direct traffic. We increased our frequencies and capacity to Helsinki, and we're upgrading our second flight to London to also be a 350-1000. So we've actually increased capacity to Europe. We're also looking at, more locally, our subsidiary airline Japan Transocean. Is putting an additional flight from Naha in Okinawa to Taiwan. So we're still seeing a lot of inbound growth and we haven't seen any negative impact on our network directly related to oil prices or the Middle East. Yeah, outbound is— it depends where we compare to. So if I look at previous years, so compared to 2025, I think we're actually looking at about a 4% increase. So the year-on-year increases for Japan are there. But if I compare back to 2019, the overall market is still about 60% of what it was in 2019. Biggest impact is still the yen. Okay. So the depreciation of the yen from ¥109 in 2019 to ¥165 today. So it makes overseas travel for leisure travel A lot more expensive, so that's not stimulating the market anymore. But business travel is very strong, even from Japan. But leisure travel is a very slow increase.
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