It will also be possible to purchase paper tickets for next year’s Osaka-Kansai Expo.

For next year’s World Expo, admission tickets will only be available for purchase online in order to control visitor congestion. However, some have pointed out that the purchasing process is too complicated.

In this context, at a board meeting on June 27, the Expo Association decided to start selling paper tickets at convenience stores and travel agencies nationwide from around October of this year for people who are not familiar with using smartphones or who want to purchase tickets easily.

Meanwhile, the association is also encouraging those who have purchased paper tickets to make reservations online for a specific date and time.

(Hiroyuki Ishige, Secretary General of the Japan Expo Association) “A major aim of this Expo is to foster familiarity with IT, which is a major legacy. It is a great pity that we will lose the opportunity to learn about it (because of the paper tickets). Paper tickets are an effective way to give gifts.”

According to the association, the sale of paper tickets will require additional costs of over 2 billion yen, including the introduction of a sales system and sales fees at convenience stores.

The board meeting on the 27th also included a discussion on the overseas pavilions, whose construction has been delayed. The association is currently working on the construction of nine simplified pavilions, known as “Type X,” but only three countries have been selected so far.

If the “Type X” buildings are not used, the association may have to pay up to 7.6 billion yen to repurpose them as rest areas or set up new facilities on the vacant land.