Using a tour operator to book a trip to Japan – The Points Guy

Why we chose Japan for our family trip

It was January 2020 when my son, Aidan, then 16, found out he had qualified for a much-coveted Rotary exchange program to Japan for the summer. It was April 2020 when that plan came crashing to a pandemic-related halt. He was crushed that he would not get to travel there, but as I (and hipsters everywhere) tried my hand at perfecting a sourdough recipe in the privacy of my own kitchen, Aidan dutifully kept his eye on getting to Japan one day.

Our Japan trip: Early planning

Before I reached out to Audley Travel, I pulled together a list of our “must-haves.”

Aidan is a foodie (I’m not just saying this, he competed on “Chopped Junior” when he was in middle school), and we’re both fans of various Instagram food accounts, so I wanted culinary tours galore and a cooking lesson. He had Nagoya and Osaka on the list of his interests, for their museums and cultural sites, along with Studio Ghibli (for the uninitiated, this is the anime gold standard thanks to films like “Spirited Away,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Ponyo”).

My husband had one item on his wish list: a baseball game. The other thing they both agreed on was not having to change hotels every night like I often make them do when I’m traveling and writing.

Other than that, I wanted the first-timers basics like temples and gardens, but truly I was mostly focused on an itinerary that would be good for an older teen (although Aidan turned 20 while I was planning this trip).

Arrivals made easy

Although I was very hands-on for the preplanning stages where we refined the schedule, I was delightfully uninvolved in finalizing the schedule — and to my delight, it ended up running like clockwork.

First, a car and driver met us at the airport. After a 13-hour flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) on All Nippon Airways to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport (HND), the 25-minute drive made our arrival so much easier than having to then hop on public transportation with possible line changes to make to get to our hotel. On our return trip, we flew from Narita International Airport (NRT) to Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) on United Airlines and also had car service prearranged (about an hour’s drive), which took much of the hassle out of getting to our flight.

Exceptional tour guides

One constant in our jam-packed, multicity itinerary was our excellent tour guides.

In Tokyo, we had three tours. Among these were the famous fish emporium, Tsukiji Market, plus a fabulously fun ramen and gyoza cooking class at YUCa’s Japanese Cooking school. Both of these are things I could have found versions of on my own. However, when I did a quick search on Tripadvisor, 140 tours with “Tsukiji” came up. And that number was 152 when I searched for cooking classes in Tokyo.

Instead, I discovered that Audley carefully vets a small number of tours and classes and offers only those it finds to be the best to its clients. The ones we took were certainly excellent.

Mike, our tour guide in Kyoto, was a tea master and took us to temples, gardens and side streets in Gion where we barely spotted another tourist; quite a feat in the perpetually popular city. He also took the featured photo for this story, lovingly referred to as our Beatles Kyoto moment.

Our favorite experience of the trip was one that I would never have found on my own: a food tour of Osaka at night.

I’ll admit, I didn’t look at it very carefully, but I assumed we’d hit the spots where all the TikTok and Instagram influencers go — in other words, in front of the running man neon in Dotonbori. Instead, this tour launched from Temma Station and took us down the longest covered road in Japan. According to our personable guide, Kokoro, it’s a spot popular with locals, especially with young adults on a Saturday night, which is when we were there. It was fabulous for Aidan.

We made three stops, one for skewers of fried meat and vegetables, kushikatsu, where we sampled everything from blowfish to bitter melon; one for DIY table-grilled meats and seafood, including Kobe beef and whole squid; and finally, real okonomiyaki made right on the tabletop griddle. All three were casual and fun and turned out to be some of our favorite dining spots on our two-week trip. We were also the only Westerners at all three restaurants, a fact highlighted by the young girls and guys waving to Aidan to get his attention and trying out English phrases like “cool, dude” accompanied by thumbs up all around.

Other highlights

It wasn’t all about food and sightseeing, though. Our Audley guides made sure we got to the other priorities on our list.

A baseball day trip to Yokohama

Audley really went to bat for this one (sorry, couldn’t resist). Both Tokyo baseball teams were out of town when we were visiting, which, if I was planning on my own, would have immediately put this idea out of play. Instead, it found a game about 40 minutes away in the city of Yokohama.

This turned out to be one of our most enjoyable days. Audley prebooked our tickets and we had great seats along the third-base line. Baseball in Japan is a rowdy, rollicking good time with lots of singing, cheerleaders, fried chicken, beer and, in Yokohama, large bowls of shaved ice with mandarins on top to cool down. Plus, a big balloon release in the seventh inning made it a home run for everyone.

Nagoya and Ghibli Park: The hard-to-get ticket

I truly had no idea what a big “ask” this was when I first mentioned it. Every Japanese resident we spoke to during our trip mentioned how much they’d like to visit Ghibli Park, but that getting tickets was too tricky due to the fact they go on sale three months to the day, at midnight, before your desired date. However, Frederick came to the rescue: While I was still translating tourism pages with Google trying to find the right booking window, she emailed to say she had already gotten tickets. The trick was booking us through a cultural tour that’s only offered to foreign passport holders.

Frederick was also spot on about this being a great option for us. There is only one Ghibli Park in the world, and it is set in a former World Expo location in a wooded park. There are fields of real flowers, dense woods and a series of immersive, movie-themed sets, with food and shopping opportunities, a few rides like a carousel and the “cat bus,” but no big thrill rides. It was wonderful having a day out of the city experiencing a truly “only here” attraction.

The drawbacks

You might actually see this one coming from looking at my itinerary (and this isn’t even all of it), but we were a bit overscheduled. Of course, it’s partly my doing that I committed us to three guided tours and a cooking class in three days in Tokyo, but that was too much. I could have used more guidance in what to keep and what to drop to maximize our time without overdoing it.

What you need to know about planning a trip with a tour operator

Bottom line

So what is it like to have someone else at the wheel planning a trip to Japan?

The hardest part (for me) was relinquishing control of my itinerary to someone else, and it still takes some getting used to. The best parts, however, included having someone booking all of our Shinkansen tickets in advance, securing hard-to-book tickets, vetting every tour we took and working with fabulous guides that made our trip all the more memorable.

Ultimately, using a tour operator helped me turn a family travel dream into a reality that was even better than we could have hoped.

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