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APRIL 2020 businesstraveller.comDESTINATIONS
Hotel in Tokyo. “The Zentis Osaka is to be built along
the Dojima River and will overlook Nakanoshima island,
which hosts the Central Public Hall, one of the iconic
retro buildings here in Osaka,” the spokesperson says. “It is
just a ten- to 12-minute walk from Osaka Station. When
it opens in early summer, it will have 212 rooms, as well as
suite rooms, and the 14th to 16th floors will host rentable
apartment-styled accommodation.”A PLACE TO MEET
Until the outbreak of Covid-19, the city’s international
air links had been getting a boost. ANA flies daily from
London Heathrow to Tokyo Haneda with onward
connections to both airports in Osaka. Since last year,British Airways has operated a four-times weekly
Heathrow-Osaka service, using a B787-8 Dreamliner, a
route it had not served since 1998. Swiss introduced a
five-times weekly Zurich service last month and Qatar
Airways was planning to operate five flights a week from
Doha from this month. In the current crisis, many of these
services have been suspended.
When life returns to normality, these developments
should help with Osaka’s efforts to build its meetings and
events industry, a sector it is keen to bolster. “There is a
developing trend for cities to create ‘all-in-one’ convention
centre and meeting spaces,” says a spokesperson at the
Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau. “However, in the
case of Osaka, both the Osaka International Convention
Centre and Intex Osaka [two of the city’s main facilities]
are relatively far away from one other. This makes it hard to
allow for such joint, integrated operation. That being said,
with the huge opportunity posed by the likely arrival of
integrated resorts to Osaka, we expect brand new facilities
that we will be able to use to promote MICE [meetings,
incentives, conferences and exhibitions], making us more
competitive on both a national and global scale.”
Osaka has also produced a MICE catalogue that
highlights many of the pre- and post-conference
experiences available. These include performances of and
workshops on traditional Noh dance-drama and taiko
drumming, ninja experiences, and Japanese cooking
classes. If you are going to learn to cook Japanese food,
where better than Osaka? Osakaloves to make a deal, but
also to eat and have a good time.BTABOVE: Canal near
Shinsaibashisuji
Shopping Street;
BELOW: Osaka City
Central Public HallSURACHETSH/ISTOCK; GYRO/ISTOCK