JAL Seems To Ignore Muslim Travellers

Although the Japanese Government, private sector, and, especially, players in the hospitality industry in Japan have been making strenuous efforts to make the country more Muslim-friendly.  However, its largest airlines, Japan Airlines (JAL) seems to ignore this all-obvious point completely.

Today, it was reported in the media that the airlines has recently launched a brand new easy-to-use multi-lingual mobile website (www.jal.com) to assist its overseas customers with their travel needs.  The languages being displayed on the site are Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Hong Kong Traditional Chinese, Taiwan Traditional Chinese and Thai.

Quite surprisingly, none of the above-mentioned language seems to be directly related to any majority Muslim country.  Although, most of the Muslims should not have any problem accessing the site in English, they would have felt more comfortable if it also displayed either Arabic, Malay, Turkish or any other language being widely used in the Muslim world. They may have thought that all the Muslims could easily plan their travel itenerary to Japan by using the site in English.  But it is contrary to the fact.

For example, the people living in the Middle East feel very comfortable performing all their Internet related activities in Arabic instead of English. In the same way, Indonesians for whom the Japanese government has been planning to waive the visa requirement to come to Japan, know almost no English.

Apart from the language issues, the website is pretty user-friendly.  Customers could plan their travels without any hassle.