Okinawa Tourist Service (OTS) was established in 1958, 14 years before Okinawa was returned to Japan. OTS was established on Kokusai-dori in Naha City, with its main mission being accepting visitors to Okinawa who are visiting memorial graves and assisting with the travel of U.S. military personnel stationed in Okinawa.
The Tokyo branch office was opened in 1966 to establish a sales and distribution channel for travel to Okinawa from Tokyo and surrounding areas. . This led to the creation of a business model in which purchasing and planning trips and selling them in the mainland market is all done in house.
In 1970, OTS opened Okinawa’s first car rental company, “OTS Rent-a-Car”, which was licensed by USCAR (United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands). Since there are no railroads in Okinawa and it is difficult to travel by public transportation, renting a car became the primary means of transportation for travel.
In the 1980s, Okinawa grew in popularity as a beach resort nationwide and many tourists headed to the island. This was the dawn of Okinawa tourism. OTS has played a number of important roles in this process.
Since the 1990s, we have focused on inbound tourism from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Asian countries (travel to Japan), and have led the tourism industry as a pioneer in inbound tourism not only to Okinawa, but also Japan.
We launched “RanRan-Tour” as a personalized travel service in 1997 and it is now a well-established web-based product. Thanks to the support of our customers, over 3 million people have used this service.
In addition, our travel reservation site is linked in real time with the systems of major Japanese airlines – ANA and JAL.
Although we suffered huge losses during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we were able to achieve a miraculous recovery thanks to the support of our customers and business partners and the cooperation of our employees.
We are sincerely grateful for this support.
We will continue to play a role in continuously improving the quality of life (QOL) of our customers, communities, and colleagues through travel.
We will continue to deliver excitement and do our best based on our motto “Keeping our roots locally, reaching out to the world”.