au Travel (auトラベル)

» see autravel.auone.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular opened au Travel on 1 April 2015 as a smartphone-web storefront, the official travel site of a mobile carrier. It was free to use, but you had to sign in with an au ID and hold a data subscription on the account, and the terms would not let you register if you lived outside Japan. That last clause is most of why it left no trace outside Japan: this was a service you could only reach by being somebody's mobile customer first.

What it sold was ordinary. An overseas half handled flights and hotels, with packaged tours alongside them. A domestic half handled flights and places to sleep, and highway bus seats arrived that autumn. The claim on the front was fourteen thousand hotels around Japan bookable on the spot. Overseas air arrived on 30 July 2015 with live availability around the clock and a booking window three hundred days deep, covering more than fifteen hundred cities. The buses came on 7 October with eleven operators and two hundred and forty services across twenty-one routes.

The carrier part was the money. Booking earned you one percent back in au WALLET points, rising to three if you paid with the au WALLET credit card, and those points came off the price of the next thing. Smart Pass members got their own discounts. The site sat inside KDDI's shopping estate with a link in the header back to Wowma, its marketplace, and cross-sells to its insurance arm and its credit card.

~ the chronicle ~

~ whose travel agency it was ~

A travel agency in Japan trades under a registration issued by the Commissioner of the Japan Tourism Agency, and the number is printed on the site. On au Travel it read registered travel business number 982 on every page it ever served, and it never belonged to KDDI.

It belonged to a company that changed its name twice underneath the storefront. At launch the footer credited Air Link. On 1 June 2015 the site posted a notice headed that the logo was changing, explaining that the operating company had been renamed and the mark now read au Travel by DeNA Travel. Three years later the same entity changed hands again: Evolable Asia filed the share transfer with the exchange for 31 May 2018, and from 1 June the operator was Airtrip. Three company names under one registration number that never moved, with a carrier's logo sitting over the top of all of it the entire time.

~ the year with the forms switched off ~

What sets this one apart is that the service stopped doing its job long before it stopped existing. Highway bus reservations closed on 14 March 2018. Everything else followed on 21 May, under a notice headed that au Travel had ended its acceptance of reservations. That is eleven and a half months before the site actually went away, and KDDI's own record of the service carries the state as a field value: new bookings ended.

You can watch it happen in the page weight. The last archived copy from May 2018 is a hundred and seventy-two thousand bytes with nine separate booking and search widgets in it. The copy from November the same year is under nineteen thousand bytes and has none. What was left was a login page, kept alive so that anyone holding a flight or a hotel night bought before the cutoff could still find their reservation.

~ the day itself ~

It ended on Thursday 9 May 2019. Both the service's own farewell and KDDI's register page use the plain verb for a service ending, and neither offers a reason: they are thank-you notes, one of them opening on how long customers had stayed with it. KDDI issued no press release. A sweep of the carrier's own 2019 service notices turns up four items for the whole year and none of them is this one, on a path that is demonstrably not pruned, so the silence is real rather than an artifact.

The farewell did point people somewhere, and that pointing is as near to an explanation as anyone got. Domestic lodging was handed off to Relux, a booking service KDDI had taken majority control of back in February 2017, fifteen months before au Travel's reservations closed. The other two destinations were third-party brands. Whether the carrier decided it would rather own a hotel site than rent an airline one is a reasonable guess and it stays a guess, because no document anywhere connects the two.

One date detail with nothing behind it except the coincidence. 9 May 2019 fell three days after the end of the ten-day holiday Japan took for the accession of the new emperor, an unusually long continuous break by the standards of a Japanese working year. The official travel site of the country's second largest mobile carrier was switched off the week after it.

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