Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology Tencent, and Tabelog, the restaurant search and reservation service operated by Kakaku.com, today announced the launch of the Tabelog Weixin Mini Program (Tabelog日本美食厅预约) for Chinese visitors to Japan. The mini program was launched on April 23, 2025 within Weixin—one of the most popular social platforms in China, together with its international version WeChat, serve over 1.3 billion users combined.
The Tabelog Weixin Mini Program allows visitors from China to easily search and reserve restaurants in Japan via Weixin. By supporting everything from pre-planned dining plans to making reservations during the trip, the new mini program introduces visitors to the diverse, regional Japanese culinary cultures and provides restaurants a new platform to attract customers.
The new Mini Program was developed with the comprehensive support of Tencent Cloud, which has been offering its robust cloud infrastructure, technical expertise, and high integration capabilities within the Tencent ecosystem, including many Weixin mini programs to ensure an intuitive and high-performance user experience.
Weixin is a digital ecosystem used in all aspects of daily life in China, offering a variety of services including chat, social, and payment. Among these, the Mini Program is an application function that can be launched on Weixin, and is used by many users to complete various daily activities, such as shopping and transportation, within a single application.
With the Tabelog Weixin Mini Program, Chinese visitors to Japan will be able to access information on Tabelog on Weixin and smoothly make reservations while checking a wealth of restaurant information such as map search, restaurant photos, hours of operation, and reviews through a Chinese-language UI. This makes it possible for a complete user experience within Weixin, from choosing a restaurant before visiting Japan to dining out during the trip. The mini app will also enable restaurants to attract more customers by as they gain more exposure through this new platform.
Features of the Tabelog Weixin Mini Program:
The newly launched Mini Program uses Weixin Pay as payment method. In addition, two types of reservations will be offered: “seat only” and “course”.
- Seat reservation (deposit-based):
When accommodating “seat-only reservations,” the program also tries to avoid no-shows by setting a certain deposit amount. This is a system that makes it easy for restaurants to accept reservations with peace of mind.
- Course reservations (advance payment): Scheduled for release this summer.
This option supports an advance payment style commonly used in the Chinese market. This will save time and effort in payment, while making users more confident and willing to make reservations.
Tencent Cloud Helps Power Up Tourism in Japan
The Japanese government has aimed to increase the number of foreign visitors to Japan to 60 million by 2030. This, along with the scheduled Osaka-Kansai Expo to be held in 2025, raises expectations for a future increase in the number of visitors to Japan.
In view of this, visitors in Japan encounter some dining-related challenges, which include difficulties in choosing or making reservations in restaurants. To address these concerns, Kakaku.com in June 2024 launched “Inbound Reservations (Tabelog Multilingual Version),” an online reservation service for inbound travelers in English, Chinese (traditional and simplified), and Korean, with the aim of providing a seamless experience that allows visitors to easily and securely find and make restaurant reservations in Japan.
In addition to the Tabelog Multilingual Version, Tabelog is also working in collaboration with major overseas services to enabe users to make reservations through platforms such as dianping.com (China), OpenRice (Hong Kong), and KKday (Taiwan).
The launch of the Tencent Cloud-powered Tabelog Weixin Mini Program is positioned as a step to further expand Tabelog’s inbound restaurant reservation initiatives, creating more beneficial points of contact for both restaurants and users.
Looking ahead, Tencent Cloud and Tabelog aim to further strengthen their collaboration through continuously promoting initiatives such as optimizing user experience, allowing anyone in the world to conveniently and smoothly select and reserve restaurants, and making as many people as possible appreciate Japanese food culture.
