The Founding Story

When I founded Delta HQ in December 2022, I was actually planning a completely different business.

I've always loved traveling — I've been backpacking around the world since my student days. Through those experiences, I've come to believe that Japan's tourism industry has unmatched global potential. When you list what makes a great tourism destination — culture, climate, food, nature, safety, infrastructure — Japan scores exceptionally high on every dimension. While cultural tourism tends to get the most attention in Japan, I believe "nature tourism" should become the backbone of the industry going forward. No other country offers such rich four-season nature, well-maintained infrastructure, and safe, easy access to the outdoors. That kind of travel holds enormous appeal for international visitors and can drive regional economic revitalization. Cultural tourism is wonderful, but it inevitably concentrates in specific areas, leading to overtourism. My ideal tourism industry is one where international travelers visit regional areas, experience rich natural resources, stimulate local economies, and create employment — a virtuous cycle.

So when I founded Delta HQ in 2022, I identified the biggest barrier to revitalizing regional tourism as "the lack of comfortable accommodations for international travelers in rural areas." No matter how rich the tourism resources, without places to stay, visits become difficult — and end up as day trips. To attract international travelers, especially high-spending affluent visitors, comfortable accommodations are essential. Spacious rooms for families, connecting rooms, well-appointed bathrooms — facilities that meet these standards are needed. But business hotels near train stations and traditional minshuku simply can't deliver the experience affluent travelers expect. Frustrated by this situation, my first business concept was a curated accommodation booking site (OTA) featuring only comfortable properties set in nature-rich regional areas. With accommodations as the starting point for boosting regional tourism, I began development around spring 2022.

I started development during COVID, and as the OTA took shape, I reached out to attractive properties in nature-rich areas like Niseko, Hakuba, and Okinawa, securing listings from dozens of facilities. Then in October 2022, border restrictions were eased and inbound tourism effectively resumed. I decided to take the completed site to Niseko and conduct user interviews. I asked one of the listed properties in Niseko to let me live on-site, and from December 2022, I spent about a month working as a shuttle bus driver while showing the site to international travelers and gathering feedback.

But within just three days of starting interviews, I realized my accommodation booking site had no value for travelers. I had been looking at Japan's tourism industry challenges, but from the travelers' perspective, booking on Airbnb or Booking.com was perfectly sufficient — they weren't struggling at all. Looking back, it seems obvious, but at the time I was blind to it. At that point, I decided to stop OTA development.

I went back to basics and reconsidered: "What is the real problem?" While working at the accommodation where I was staying, my attention turned to the hotel's core system (PMS). Unlike the systems I'd encountered in fintech and e-commerce, it was extremely outdated and operations were completely inefficient. Because the system wasn't functioning properly, it caused problems for travelers too. I personally experienced this — a miscommunication about a pickup location meant I left a guest waiting for an hour in a Niseko blizzard. During peak season in Niseko, room rates aren't cheap, and guests expect a certain level of service. Yet inefficient systems were degrading traveler satisfaction, exhausting staff, and making no one happy. As a result, properties that should have been able to raise prices held back for fear of complaints, staff turnover increased, and various problems cascaded.

Hotel operations are extremely complex — from reservation to checkout, a long chain of diverse tasks occurs. In Niseko, each property also has owners and investors, and after checkout there's a monthly obligation to prepare and submit revenue reports to owners.

The current state of hospitality systems is outdated and fragmented. PMS, channel manager, booking engine, OTA, owner relations, pre-check-in — an enormous number of systems exist to process "a single reservation." One task requires System A, the next System B, then Excel, and finally paper-based tallying — extremely inconvenient, error-prone, and a drag on industry progress. The scope is vast and operations differ by property, so it was clear this would be highly complex development. But the more I researched, the less innovation I found in this space. Despite industry conventions and high barriers to entry, I thought "if I don't do this, nothing will change" — and committed to building it.

One barrier to entry was the sheer engineering effort required given the breadth of systems involved. Drawing on connections from my fintech days, I decided to build the development team in Indonesia. The timing coincided with the post-COVID period when mass layoffs were happening at Southeast Asian tech companies, so hiring went very smoothly and I was able to assemble an exceptionally talented team. We spent six months developing the MVP and began sales. Despite the extremely high adoption hurdle for a core system, we secured early deployments — confirming that the market was ready. In a space where startups can be built on just one fragment of these systems, building an all-in-one infrastructure is far from easy. Still, every day our team of about 50 engineers pushes forward, working closely with clients.

What I'm striving for is to unlock the potential of the tourism industry, enrich more people's lives, and contribute to building a better society. A tourism industry where many people enjoy travel, where residents and visitors build mutually happy relationships — that's the kind of industry I want to support through the power of systems.