Another visitor guide
dives into fray

The name Rurubu belongs to Japan-based JTB Publishing and is a combination of suffixes from Japanese words, said Obun Hawaii Group President Don Ojiri.

In Japanese, miru means to see, taberu means to eat and asobu means to play.

Obun Hawaii handles advertising sales and editorial content for the JTB Rurubu series that is sold in Japan for people planning travel to Hawaii, Ojiri said. Rurubu Free Honolulu is a quarterly local supplement to JTB Rurubu in Japan that will be distributed in Hawaii come July.

It is one of several visitor publications Obun produces for JTB and other companies. It is also the latest of perhaps two dozen Japanese visitor-targeted publications in Hawaii, according to Joseph Bozelli, director of operations and administration for PacRim Marketing Group Inc. The company works with competing publishers of visitor guides including the Chikyu no Arukikata series.

So many visitor publications is too many?

"Boy, Hawaii is very well-served," said Isabel Figel, president and associate publisher of JGH International/Japanese Guide to Hawaii. "There are too many and new ones are always popping up."

There are also Hawaii travel guide books and special interest magazines in bookstores, and publications by tour companies and airlines, Figel said.

"I think many restaurants and businesses are just overwhelmed by the many sales reps who call on them with the 'latest and greatest' to reach Japanese visitors. To be honest, I can't keep up with them all," said Figel.

Ojiri is confident Rurubu Free Honolulu will do well because of its branding in Japan and its affiliation with JTB, a major Japanese travel agency. It plans quarterly distribution of 60,000 40-page issues in July, October and December this year.

New, exciting and trendy are the qualities that will separate the wheat from the chaff among visitor publications, Ojiri said.

"The Japanese people are great readers of printed material and they're very astute travelers now. A lot of them are repeat visitors so they're looking for the bargains. So those magazines that provide interest and coupons and kind of trendy stuff, I think, will still do well."