All Nippon Airways (ANA) has finally joined the long queue of foreign carriers operating through Thailand to introduce a Thai-friendly website.
The Thai website of All Nippon Airways is launched to lure Thai travellers.
The Japanese carrier, which prides itself on being a five-star airline, has just rolled out a Thai-language website, its first even though Bangkok has been a key market for ANA for a considerable time.
The introduction reflects the greater importance ANA is placing on Thailand in an unprecedented approach to lure Thai travellers onto its aircraft.
This comes in the wake of the growing popularity of Japan as a top overseas destination for Thai travellers and ANA's bid to make itself more Thai-friendly as other airlines serving the Thailand-Japan sector have long done through Thai-language websites.
According to latest figures from the Japan National tourism Organisation (JNTO), Thai visitors to Japan jumped 25.8% in the first eight months of this year to 506,800.
JNTO is sticking to its projection of 700,000 Thai visitors this year, up from last year's record of 657,600. It expects Thai visitors to reach 1 million by 2020.
About 30% of overall passengers ANA has on board its flights out of Bangkok are Thais, with 40% being Japanese and 30% of other nationalities, according to an ANA official.
ANA operates four flights a day from Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi to Tokyo's Haneda and Narita airports with frequencies splitting equally, using Boeing 787-8 "Dreamliner" and Boeing777-300 jets.
There is no plan for ANA to raise its flight frequency through Bangkok in the new programme that begins this month as its fourth daily service was only introduced in August.
ANA has a few foreign language websites other than Japanese and English in place. The others are French, German, Mandarin and Korean.