A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

Just wanted to leave a comment that I really enjoy reading the articles about how the Japanese solve or create infrastructure problems for their ageing conservative society posted on here the past few weeks.

Also read a very interesting piece about the railway system the other day. Thank you for providing a valuable perspective I wouldn’t get access to otherwise and also proposing possible solutions and practical advise for your fellow citizens. Keep up the good work.

Re: A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

#5

Post by rtpg » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 6:41 AM UTC

Was kinda curious about the pricing and honestly the pricing[0] seems like one digit less than I expected. 10k JPY for the number, then 1k JPY per some of the various options (stuff like routing seems to be literally "we set up a phone tree and at the end of the phone tree we just dial a number you give us")

So it sounds like in the end you need to pay 10k JPY per queue + an extra bit of money to wire it all together. Maybe with Twilio you can set up something similarly fire-and-forget but "I explain to Docomo once how to set up my phone tree" sounds nicer than "I set up a twilio... thingy".

I'm sure somebody out there has at least considered being the layer over Twilio that just offers some of these straightforward services... but... toll-free numbers on Twilio cost 27 cents a minute in Japan. Sounds real close to that 33 yen.[1]

[0]: https://www.ntt.com/business/services/voice-video/freedial-n...

[1]: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/voice/pricing/jp

Re: A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

#6

Post by freetime2 » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

I ran into this recently with ANA (All Nippon Airways). [1] There’s no better way to kill customer loyalty than to put someone on hold for 45 minutes on a charged phone call to make a basic change to a reservation that should be possible on the website (they also refuse to handle reservation-specific inquiries over email).

Just had a look and JAL (Japan Airlines) also doesn’t offer a FreeCall number. I haven’t had reason to call them yet though, so not sure if hold times are as bad as ANA. ANA recently redid their website and it’s a flaming pile of garbage (I could go on another whole rant here about all the ways it’s broken), which I suspect may be increasing call volumes for the past year or so.

[1] https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/contact/international/inte...

Re: A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

#7

Post by enaaem » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 10:16 AM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #3

If the suicide prevention hotline cost $15/hr in the USA people would freak out! But since it's Japan it's whatever.

Because people want to copy the best things of another society, and not the worst.

Re: A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

#8

Post by bschwindHN » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #6

I ran into this recently with ANA (All Nippon Airways). [1] There’s no better way to kill customer loyalty than to put someone on hold for 45 minutes on a charged phone call to make a basic change to a reservation that should be possible on the website (they also refuse to handle reservation-specific inquiries over email). Just had a look and JAL (Japan Airlines) also doesn’t offer a FreeCall number. I haven’t had re…

I try to fly with Skymark when I can because their website is gloriously basic in the best way possible, it's like barebones server-rendered HTML. And you can book your ticket without payment being in the critical flow. You get like 24 hours to pay and that removes SO much stress from booking airline tickets. I hope they never change or "modernize" it with some shitty JS framework.

Re: A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

#9

Post by tetrakai » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 10:26 AM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #6

I ran into this recently with ANA (All Nippon Airways). [1] There’s no better way to kill customer loyalty than to put someone on hold for 45 minutes on a charged phone call to make a basic change to a reservation that should be possible on the website (they also refuse to handle reservation-specific inquiries over email). Just had a look and JAL (Japan Airlines) also doesn’t offer a FreeCall number. I haven’t had re…

This is bizarre! When you call ANA from Australia they have multiple dedicated 1800 (free) numbers you can reach them at, including a call centre in the Philippines for simple issues that picked up straight away for me. I wonder why they're so much more customer hostile in their own geography?

Re: A Look into NaviDial, Japan's Legacy Phone Service

#10

Post by freetime2 » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 10:47 AM UTC

bschwindHN wrote: post #8

freetime2 wrote: post #6

I ran into this recently with ANA (All Nippon Airways). [1] There’s no better way to kill customer loyalty than to put someone on hold for 45 minutes on a charged phone call to make a basic change to a reservation that should be possible on the website (they also refuse to handle reservation-specific inquiries over email). Just had a look and JAL (Japan Airlines) also doesn’t offer a FreeCall number. I haven’t had re…

I try to fly with Skymark when I can because their website is gloriously basic in the best way possible, it's like barebones server-rendered HTML. And you can book your ticket without payment being in the critical flow. You get like 24 hours to pay and that removes SO much stress from booking airline tickets. I hope they never change or "modernize" it with some shitty JS framework.

ANA’s domestic reservation system is not too bad in my experience, and I think is similarly basic like Skymark. They also allow you to hold a reservation for 24 hours without paying, and cancellations are free I think even after you’ve paid. It does struggle a bit with the concept of middle names, though.

But ANA’s international bookings use a completely different system that is the single worst website that I’ve used in the past 20 years. And yeah part of it is that they’ve tried to add some javascript without having the requisite competence to, say, perform proper input validation or render server error messages to the screen properly. I recently needed to enter an address, for example, but when I clicked the submit button nothing happened. It was only by snooping around in developer tools that I realized the server didn’t allow dashes in this particular address field.

Edit: apparently ANA is “upgrading” their domestic booking system to use the same Amadeus platform their international bookings use starting May 19, 2026. You can clearly see a different booking flow depending on whether you search before or after that date. So I retract my earlier positive statement about their domestic bookings.