Photo= Kyoto City's wholly redesigned tourist information website for foreigners

Kyoto City has recently redesigned its entire tourist information website for foreigners, "Kyoto Official Travel Guide." It enhanced the site's convenience by facilitating booking for accommodations and experiential activities, along with other changes. It also increased the number of supported languages to 13, the most among local governments' websites in Japan.

The website was established in April 2007. In 2013, the number of page views reached approximately 4,000,000. A study conducted by the city found that 33 percent of foreign tourists to the city use the website.

A renowned travel magazine in the USA ranked Kyoto as the world's most popular city for the first time this year. Moreover, it is expected that more attention from overseas will be focused on Japan and Kyoto thanks to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Therefore, enhancing the dissemination of information was deemed necessary.

As a part of the redesign, its home page provides a link to "tripadvisor," the world's largest tourist information site. On this site, users can choose a hotel that suits their needs by easily checking reviews and comparing prices of hotels. Also, its aggregate information has advanced, so it is possible to make reservations for experiential activities such as tea ceremony or flower arrangement, and to search for duty-free shops.

Previously, only eight languages, including English, French, Korean, and others, had been available on the website, but five other languages, such as Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, have been added so that more foreigners can use the website.