Japan Trip Planning Update

I'm really starting to feel super unorganised with this trip now, we go in less than 60 days and we still haven't fully finalised our plans or even bought our JR Rail passes yet!

Although, to be fair the JR Passes are only valid for three months so we'll probably buy them in the next week or so now that we'll arrive within the validity period.

We've finally booked all* of our hotels - we're staying at the Sakura Hotel in Ikebukuro, Disney's Ambassador Hotel, MyStays Maihama, Granvia Hiroshima, Granvia Osaka, Granvia Kyoto and the Hotel Sunny.

* I kind of want to add an extra night at Disney, just so we don't have to force onto a commuter train with luggage early in the morning! Currently looking at Disney Celebration, MyStays Maihama and Oriental Tokyo Bay hotels.

We have our pocket wifi all booked, it'll be waiting for us at our hotel when we arrive, as always we've booked ours with Global Advanced Communications.

I started doing a little bit of budget planning, it's not something i've ever done for a Japan trip before but since we're paying for a couple of our hotels in cash I wanted to see what was needed where so we could separate the money. 

I'm pretty sure I've calculated it wrong, I must have, because for the full fifteen days in Japan our food is working out at ¥23,550pp! That's only £160!

Of course that doesn't cover the vast amount of cold drinks and treats we'll need throughout the trip, but with a bottle of Coca Cola costing ¥200 (£1.37) in the Disney theme parks and understandably less elsewhere in the country that's not looking too bad either.

That's not to say i'm going to be really sensible with our money though, I already have an entire list of Disney food souvenir add-ons I want to purchase - up to an approx total of ¥12,710/£86.86.

We've already started exchanging some GBP for JPY and even managed to pick up a few thousand worth in coins on eBay at a slightly better rate (also means we now have change ready for when we see Gachapon machines hueheuehue).

We're expecting our Disney park tickets to be around ¥19,400/£133 for 3 days pp, a slightly higher rate (approx £10) than buying them at the ticket gate as these are special hopper tickets for onsite guests only - all other TDR tickets only allow you to visit one park per day on days 1 and 2.

Our Universal Studios tickets will be ¥7,900/£54 pp for 1 day, although we've only pencilled in a day here, we may end up cancelling it as we didn't see much of Osaka last time we visited either due to the Naruto exhibition.

Having a quick look at our daily plan I can't see anything else we need to pay an entrance fee for - except maybe a couple of temples (but the fees are generally really cheap) and I know my fiancé
wants to go back to Ueno Zoo, we don't have it planned in at the minute but we do have three free days on the timetable, but i'm trying not to over plan, something always goes wrong timewise!
Our 2015 trip our connecting flight was delayed by a couple of hours and our 2016 trip our first flight was delayed, twice, and had it not somehow managed to make time and get us there before our original landing time then we'd have no doubt missed our flight.


I'm just going to leave this here for now until we get a bit more planning done, keep checking back for more updates and feel free to comment or tweet if you need any help booking/planning your trip! :)