VitaNet Japan Confirms AccuNotify™ Can Expand from Naha Airport to Passenger Flow Across Tourism, Transport and MaaS

VitaNet Japan Inc. announced that, through a demonstration project led by the Okinawa General Bureau of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism on stress-free inbound tourism circulation and guidance using BLE authentication technology, it confirmed that AccuNotify™’s effectiveness as an advertising and promotional touchpoint inside Naha Airport can be extended across broader passenger flows, including Yui Rail stations, in-vehicle use, and potential integration with campus MaaS. The BLE Stations installed for the project are cloud-managed IoT devices developed with VitaNet’s proprietary technology. They automatically switch between a secure beacon function that allows smartphones to detect proximity and a BLE communication function that enables two-way communication with smartphone apps when needed. AccuNotify™ uses BLE Stations placed along passenger routes to integrate proximity detection, notification delivery, and collection of notification responses. By converting passenger movement paths into digital touchpoints on smartphones, AccuNotify™ demonstrated potential beyond retail media within a single facility, showing that it could become a “route-based digital infrastructure” that guides each passenger to their next destination, store, or facility. Traditionally, airports, railways, buses, tourism facilities, and commercial facilities have handled guidance, advertising, and promotions separately. However, travelers’ store visits, purchases, and facility usage emerge within a continuous journey that includes airport arrival, rail and bus travel, sightseeing, dining, and lodging. In tourism areas in particular, while many travelers gather at airports and stations, building mechanisms that naturally guide them to local stores, tourism facilities, commercial venues, and restaurants remains a key challenge. This demonstration sought to restructure fragmented facility-by-facility guidance, advertising, and promotion into a series of digital touchpoints aligned with passenger flows, with the aim of developing measures for inter-facility circulation and customer referrals. In addition to Naha Airport, BLE Stations were installed along the Yui Rail line connecting the airport to the city center, including Kencho-mae Station, Shuri Station, and Tedako-Uranishi Station, to verify passenger responses. The results showed the potential to use AccuNotify™ to continuously form digital touchpoints along passenger routes and design flows that guide users to their next destinations, stores, or facilities. The project also examined possible connections with campus MaaS initiatives being considered by universities in Okinawa Prefecture. It verified potential applications for digital touchpoints related to guidance, authentication, and usage confirmation across mobility paths inside and outside campuses, including buses and vehicles, parking lots, and facility entry and exit management. The results indicated that AccuNotify™ could expand beyond station premises and walking routes into MaaS-related digital touchpoints such as buses, shuttles, campus mobility, parking lots, and transport to tourism facilities. Conventional beacon use commonly estimates user location and routes in the cloud based on signals received by smartphones. By contrast, advancing services in tourism, transport, and MaaS requires more than simple location estimation. It is important to handle when, where, and what types of notifications and user reactions occurred as more reliable real-time touchpoint data. AccuNotify™ uses VitaNet’s proprietary secure beacon signals transmitted from BLE Stations to treat information about which BLE Station a user was near, when they received a notification, and how they responded as highly reliable real-time movement touchpoint data linked to installed stations. When a user enters the notification range set for each BLE Station, notification content is delivered on demand from the server, enabling information delivery based on on-site conditions and campaign settings. For example, tourism facility and store guidance can be delivered at airports or stations, while BLE Stations installed at the guided destinations can support evaluation combining visits, proximity, and notification responses. With user consent, the technology showed potential for route understanding, circulation analysis, improvement of guidance and promotional measures, and future MaaS integration. As part of the demonstration, the company also reviewed data items that AccuNotify™ could provide through API integration, with external system linkage in mind. The reviewed items included installation location identifiers, notification transmission times, distance-related information between mobile devices and installation locations, and whether notifications were clicked. These items were organized as foundational information for linkage with existing transport, tourism, and MaaS systems, and were confirmed to be useful for future external system integration. This showed that AccuNotify™ could also be developed as an API-connected data infrastructure linking transport, tourism, and commercial services. With user consent, integration with membership attributes and user categories on external services could further enable guidance, promotions, and regional services tailored to tourists, local residents, and other audiences. For regional economies, AccuNotify™ can turn the places where passengers actually pass through, board or alight, and stay into digital touchpoints on smartphones, providing a foundation for local businesses to deliver information to travelers at the right time. For example, transportation and tourism information can be delivered upon airport arrival; nearby store and transfer information inside stations; destination-based guidance in vehicles or campus MaaS; and tickets, coupons, multilingual guidance, and congestion avoidance information near tourism facilities. Airport operators and transport providers can gain new touchpoints for passenger guidance, advertising, and promotion. Municipalities and tourism DMOs may use it to encourage visitor circulation, disperse congestion, and expand local consumption opportunities. Retail, dining, and tourism facilities may gain a new referral channel to encourage visits, purchases, and facility use among travelers actually passing nearby. Based on the results, VitaNet will advance AccuNotify™ beyond airport advertising and store promotions, positioning it as route-based digital infrastructure spanning airports, railways, buses, tourism facilities, and commercial facilities. The company aims to build service models in cooperation with transport operators, airport operators, municipalities, tourism DMOs, retail and dining businesses, and advertisers, contributing to improved traveler convenience, regional consumption, congestion mitigation, multilingual guidance, and optimized tourism circulation. Through API integration, VitaNet will also explore connections with regional currency, purchasing and e-commerce, and administrative service guidance, considering development as a regional service platform that supports not only tourists but also local residents’ everyday mobility, consumption, and service use. VitaNet Japan is a technology company specializing in smartphone-based identity authentication and proximity-linked notification technologies in physical spaces. By combining its proprietary cloud platform, SDK, and VitaNet Station, the company enables area-linked information delivery and promotional measures in retail stores, airports, and transportation facilities. Through its main solutions, AccuNotify™ and AccuAuth™, VitaNet supports enterprise digital transformation.