Insider Tokyo Tips from Kei Shibata

Travel Massive brings to you a new series featuring our communities most amazing chapters! Written by Travel Massive insiders themselves, sharing with the world why they love their chapter meet ups!

Today’s featured chapter is brought to you by Kei Shibata, co-founder of Japan’s largest online travel metasearch business – Travel.jp and Hotel.jp under Venture Republic Inc. Kei is also our Travel Massive Tokyo and Singapore chapter leader and is happy to share all his best memories along the way.

What makes your chapter unique?

Tokyo is a city in constant evolution, with so many different facets that offers you new surprises and discoveries everyday. The food is also particularly rich and diverse here.

Tell us about your chapter leaders

We are running the Tokyo chapter with our colleagues of Venture Republic. They are in charge of content marketing, communication management, PR, and Sales, among other things. Therefore, we have a lot of connections within the travel industry especially in Japan as a travel metasearch business (company).

What is your most memorable event in this chapter?

As a matter of fact, we had our first launch event last August. We are so excited to hold our next event on 22nd December in Tokyo.

What have you learned about your chapter through events?

Our first even was quite huge, and we had to increase the capacity of the venue in the week before the event, as we suddenly got flooded with messages from people who wanted to attend.

We ran a small survey, and got replies from 28 attendees. Here are some conclusions we could make from these replies, as well as from the general opinions we could hear during the event.

• 36% of attendees were women
• 85% of attendees were Japanese
• 11% of attendees were bloggers/writers
• Most attend events from start to finish
• Attendees are happy with the diversity of backgrounds and managed to make interesting encounters
• Attendees enjoy the casual tone of Travel Massive events

If you could highlight 3 awesome people in your chapter, who would it be?

Without a doubt, they are Adele Pinet, Hiroyo Koike and Yoko Zenbayshi. Three of “Tokyo’s Angels” who took our chapter to become something meaningful and fun with a scale only in a few months!

List a themed meet up you could see this chapter hosting.

Our first event was very large, as we first wanted to see what kind of people in Tokyo would be interested in Travel Massive. Although we think that mixing people with different backgrounds and specialties can bring us to extremely rich and unconventional discussions, we would also like to try to focus more on one theme: be it travel writing/blogging, engineering and tech, or even more marketing-related subjects, we’re ready to try different things out!

Our Featured Chapter post is a weekly series that profiles a unique Travel Massive chapter from around the world. Connect with Kei on Travel Massive or join the Tokyo Chapter for updates on their upcoming event.