(Bloomberg) — At Japanese APA hotels, the rooms are notoriously tiny, the amenities surprisingly luxurious and the brand unmistakable. Now, the family-owned chain that turned efficiency into a hospitality empire is betting it can export its typically Japanese formula abroad, starting with North America.
APA Group, the Tokyo-based hotel conglomerate founded five decades ago by the late Toshio Motoya and his wife Fumiko, is seeking international growth at a time when Japan’s tourism boom — driven by the weak yen — masks deeper demographic headwinds. Executive President Isshi Motoya, the couple’s 55-year-old son and heir to the business, stated that the company plans to increase international revenue and advance further in the high-end hospitality segment, marking a new phase for a brand long associated with compact spaces and hyper-efficient design.
The plan now, said Isshi, is to directly operate hotels in large US gateway cities, operate via franchises in regional markets and, later, build a broader network around the Pacific, connecting Japan to Hawaii and Australia. The company projects an increase of more than 30% in revenue by fiscal year 2030 and intends to double the number of rooms in hotels abroad, to 10,000, in the following year. The expectation is that part of the growth will come through acquisitions outside Japan.
Study abroad
Upgrade your career!
The international foray began a decade ago, with the acquisition of the Vancouver-based Coast Hotels chain. APA’s plan is to use Coast to build a premium reputation abroad and then “reimport” that image to Japan, Isshi said at the company’s Tokyo headquarters. Japanese consumers tend to admire established Western brands, he said, arguing that turning Coast into a respected international name could ultimately boost APA’s own image in the domestic market. “Just like Toyota did with Lexus.”
APA built its name in Japan on a standardized formula: a long list of amenities packed into compact rooms, designed for maximum efficiency, in dense urban locations. In some resorts, guests can relax in communal baths inspired by traditional Japanese onsen, although the rooms are often so small that they barely allow a large suitcase to be fully opened.
Privately held and still tightly controlled by the founding family, APA Group — an acronym for “Always Pleasant Amenities” — began in 1971 as a real estate company created by Toshio Motoya. The business later expanded into hotels, with the opening of the first hotel in the historic city of Kanazawa, on the west coast of Japan, in 1984.
Continues after advertising
From these roots, APA has become one of Japan’s most recognized hotel operators, with more than 1,100 hotels and nearly 150,000 rooms in its global network.
APA Group projects strong growth until 2030
Since acquiring Coast Hotels, APA has used the chain as its beachhead in North America. Coast operates 44 franchised locations in the region, and in 2024, APA took a bigger step by purchasing and rebranding a former Hilton hotel in Seattle — its first directly operated development in the United States.
Rooms at APA-run hotels abroad come equipped with TOTO toilet seats with washlets, a cult item among foreign visitors to Japan, as well as handheld shower heads and origami cranes carefully placed on the beds. Still, the chain is adapting its formula to American tastes. The Seattle hotel’s smallest room measures 21 square meters (about 226 square feet), roughly twice the size of a standard room at one of its hotels in Tokyo’s upscale Roppongi neighborhood. Isshi also said he was surprised to realize that many hotel rooms in North America still use fixed showers, forcing housekeepers to use buckets of water when cleaning — a slower process than using handheld showers, common in Japan.
But analysts warn the group will face significant challenges as it moves forward in an already crowded North American budget and mid-range hotel market, where major chains are expanding rapidly and dominant players such as Marriott International Inc. and Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. control vast loyal customer bases and booking platforms. “An unaffiliated foreign brand, without a comparable loyalty ecosystem, already starts at a huge distribution disadvantage,” said Krishna Sharma of market consultancy ReportPrime. Budget hotels in the US — the segment that APA targets — saw revenue per available room grow 0.6% in 2025, while midscale chains advanced 1.9%, less than half the pace of luxury hotels, 4.2%, according to ReportPrime.
The strategy comes from an audience that APA already knows well. American travelers now represent the largest share of the chain’s international guests in Japan, ahead of visitors from Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand.
The domestic hotel market still has room to grow with the recovery of international tourism. In 2025, a record 42.7 million foreign tourists will visit Japan. But in the long term, the sector faces a more challenging demographic scenario.
Continues after advertising
“While Japan’s travel and accommodation market is expected to continue growing in the short term due to the increase in foreign tourists, it may face a contraction in the long term due to the aging population,” said Taro Yamato, senior analyst at Euromonitor International. “Therefore, diversifying revenue sources via international expansion is a logical strategic direction.”
Isshi Motoya became chief executive of APA Group in 2022, marking a generational transition as his father, Toshio, remained chairman and his mother, Fumiko, continued as president of the hotel operation. Within Japan, however, it was often Fumiko — not her husband — who became the public face of the company.
Known for her flamboyant hats, colorful outfits, and theatrical brand-building style, Fumiko Motoya has transformed herself into a ubiquitous symbol of the APA. His image is spread across Japan on billboards, hotel advertisements and even on water bottles in rooms. With the catchphrase “I am the president”, she cultivated an almost celebrity profile, with appearances on TV shows, articles in magazines and tireless promotion of the network.
Continues after advertising
“She was an exceptional saleswoman, with incredibly keen business instincts,” Isshi said. “She used to joke that she liked sales more than eating.”
The couple’s youngest son, 51-year-old Taku Motoya, serves as senior director of APA Group, reinforcing how firmly the empire remains under family control. The Motoyas’ fortune was estimated for the first time this year by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at about $2 billion, almost entirely derived from their stake in the group.
Born into a family that built APA from scratch, Isshi describes an unconventional childhood shaped by late-night business discussions, property visits, and conversations filled with real estate jargon and expansion plans. “He rarely treated me like a child,” Isshi said of Toshio, who died at age 82 earlier this year.
Continues after advertising
If the father led by force of personality and ideological conviction, the son describes his own leadership style in very different terms. While Toshio preferred top-down decisions, Isshi says modern management is more like an “inverted pyramid,” in which executives support employees rather than simply commanding them. “Flexibility and acceptance are more important today,” he said.
Isshi also appears determined to soften the political profile that has long hung over the APA under his father’s leadership.
Toshio Motoya was a prominent figure in Japan’s conservative nationalist circles and founded Shoheijuku, a political forum and think tank associated with revisionist views on Japan’s wartime history, which attracted right-wing parliamentarians and public figures, including current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
Continues after advertising
In 2017, the APA found itself at the center of a diplomatic controversy after videos circulated on the internet in China highlighting texts published by Toshio Motoya that denied the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the mass murder of civilians by Japanese troops in the Chinese city. The reaction was swift: Chinese authorities ordered online travel platforms to stop cooperating with the APA, and bookings disappeared from the country’s main travel sites.
Isshi has not explicitly repudiated his father’s views, but he is moving away from putting them at the forefront. “In today’s society, we need to consider whether it is appropriate, from an organizational perspective, to push this type of message so strongly to the front line,” he said.
Instead, the new CEO is trying to reposition APA as a brand with greater global appeal, including sponsoring the Japanese national soccer team, which will play FIFA World Cup games in the US, Canada and Mexico later this month.
“As things change rapidly, it becomes increasingly important to be able to transform according to the context,” said Isshi. “Like water one moment, steam the next, or ice the next.”
© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.
