Multilingual Web’s version of an international exchange paper for the new generation, “SENSEUP,” created by the joint cooperation of Japanese and overseas students!

The Foreign Leader Who Manages 2000 Employees

『The Foreign Leader Who Manages 2000 Employees』 ~INTERVIEW~ Head Executive of the HIS, Mr. Sawada We interviewed the head of HIS, Mr. Hideo Sawada who advocates the employment of foreign workers.

Question 1: HIS is best known as a Japanese tour company for traveling abroad. What makes HIS better than other tour companies? What is the appeal of HIS?

Answer 1: We are the best at providing personal travel compared to other companies. If you try to travel alone through other companies it is normally quite expensive. Through HIS, however, the air tickets are very cheap and that’s why it is so popular. Also, the average age of our management staff is in the twenties and thirties. We can hope for further development using the talents of young employees.

Q 2: I found out on the internet that thirty years ago the cost of air tickets for traveling from Tokyo to London cost 700,000 yen but today it costs approximately 80,000 yen, depending on the season. Would you please tell us about your story as a leading pioneer in your industry and about selling cheap air tickets?

A 2: Twenty something years ago it was extremely hard for young people to travel overseas because of the cost. That is why we started selling tickets which were affordable to them. However, because of this generous deal of ours, we encountered many troubles and great pressure from the major tour companies. It was a challenge for us. The biggest problem we had at the time was that, even though we offered a good business deal of half-priced air tickets, it wasn’t easy for us to gain the trust of the customers considering we were a small, unknown tour company. We worked in a very small office with very few staff and we used to hand customers their tickets on the very day they left at the airport. For the first few months, even though some customers came to our office, no one really purchased our tickets. It did, however, gain popularity with the younger age groups and eventually the rumors about our good deals gradually started spreading throughout many travelers and became a widespread fact.

He was born in Osaka, February 1951. After graduating from the Ikuno Technical High School in Osaka, he studied at the Mainz University of Former East Germany between the years of 1973 and 1976. He earned pocket money from working part-time and traveled to over 50 countries in Europe, Middle-East, Africa, South America and Asia. When he came back to Japan he tried to travel again through Japanese travel agencies but every company disappointed him with their extremely expensive fees when compared to those of other countries. Since then he started to differentiate between the tourism system of Japan and that of other countries. In 1980 he established his own tour company called “International Tours” and succeeded in providing his own products, including package tours for individuals to destinations such as India, which was based on the reasonable price of air tickets. He changed the company name to HIS in 1990 and launched on JASDAQ in March 1995. In November 1996, he opened his hotel on the Gold Coast, Australia. In September 1998, he made the headlines by launching Japan’s fourth airline company, “Skymark Airlines”, and started his new business that provided customers with airline tickets that were half the price of other airline companies’ ticket fees. In January 1999, he acquired corporate stock of Kyoritsu Securities Company and became the President of HIS SECURITIES Co, Ltd and aimed to emerge in the finance industry.