Luxury night buses keep passengers online

Night buses all over the world are usually associated with travelers on a budget and it’s no different when shuttling around in Japan that it pays to take a bus. The vehicles are pretty cramped and certainly not private, but you save on a hotel room and the tickets are usually cheap.

We were a bit bemused at first by the Willer Express Executive Seat service available on a bus route between Osaka and Tokyo. Travelers are treated to reclining seats, curtains for each seat, private TV screens, and even internet access. There is even a woman-only service. However, this ain’t cheap: a one-way ticket costs 9,800 JPY ($108), nearly twice as much as a regular night bus seat.

It might sound a bit much for a night bus, since consumers usually ride them precisely because they are cheap. However, this service is filling a niche for people who don’t want to take normal buses but can’t quite afford shinkansen (the Willer Express Executive Seat ticket is still twenty to thirty percent cheaper than the bullet train).

It’s not just a demand for premium facilities that has produced these services, but also the desire to stay connected. The wifi will be a big draw for many mobile consumers who don’t want to be stuck on a bus with nothing to look at except the back of the seat in front. Keio has also run experiments on two night bus lines this winter offering passengers full wifi connections.

To foreign eyes, Japanese trains represent an ideal in convenient transportation. However, often it is much better to take night buses to rural areas and resorts (e.g. going skiing in Nagano, as in the Keio service). There is plenty of need for buses, and clearly the passenger demographic goes beyond stereotypically “poor” travelers to mobile consumers who demand better services.