How Much Should Your Japan Trip Cost? | Japan Trip Budget Breakdown

How Much Should Your Japan Trip Cost? | Japan Trip Budget Breakdown

If you want to plan a trip to Japan, one thing you may be considering is how much will this trip cost? From the plane tickets to the hotels, food, and even the time of year, all of this will impact the cost of your trip. So, let’s take a look at all of these things and more to figure out how much to budget for your Japan trip. Let’s go to Japan. The next station is Hey guys, Hong here and today we are going to look at budgeting for Japan. We are going to look at the whole range of budgets from the cheapest budgets to the luxurious budgets to help you get an idea of how much you need to all lot for your Japan trip. I’ll break the range down into a low, medium, and high budget as we walk through a possible twoweek trip to Japan for two people to help you get an idea of what saving up for a Japan trip would look like. Obvious disclaimer here, but this is a general guide and I can’t factor in every possible scenario, but I’ll try to do my best to make this helpful for all different types of travelers. With that being said, let’s dive into it. First off, flights. This is already a super big caveat because depending on where you are flying from, the costs will differ. According to Google, the average price for roundtrip tickets to Japan ranges from $450 to $2,000. So, let’s break down the range here. For the low budget, we’ll assume that flights per person cost $650, which means that you will most likely be traveling during non- peak season and will most likely be taking budget airlines. For the medium budget, we will bring the per person total to $1,000. And now for the high budget. This can include traveling during peak season, such as during the cherry blossom season, and going non-stop if possible, which will cost around $1,700. Now, we will double these numbers for our twoperson trip. Now, for this hypothetical trip, we will assume that you are flying into Tokyo. For our lowbudget trip, we will only stay in Tokyo for the duration of the 2 weeks. While for the medium and high budget trips, we will make a trip to Osaka and Kyoto along Japan’s Golden Route. Remember, if we are flying out from the United States to Tokyo, you will arrive the following day due to the time zone difference. So, you are going to book a hotel for 1 day after your flight. So, a total of 13 nights for a 2e trip instead of 14. For our lowbudget, just staying in Tokyo, we will bring our price filter down here. And there’s quite a lot of budget options for places to stay. So, let’s narrow this down even more to try to find the cheapest possible place to stay for our twoe trip. Now, I’m seeing this spot in here, lodging Tokyo Yueno for $22 a night. This is in February during off season. Looking at this booking, this is essentially for a bunk bed in a dorm room, which is at a per person price. So, it’s actually $141 for 2 weeks per person. And let’s see here. The total cost is $312.81. So, we’ll add $313 to our total here for the low budget. And I will say $313 for two people to stay in Tokyo for two weeks is actually pretty insane, but you get what you pay for. And this is a communal sleeping room with a shared bathroom. This also seems to align with the prices that I’m seeing for a capsule hotel. So, if you want to stay in the famous or infamous Japanese capsule hotel, then you can do that as well. The capsule hotels are essentially the same thing as this, but instead of a open bunk, you get a capsule that you sleep in. Though, something to note is that some of the capsules are a little bit on the smaller side. So, if you are claustrophobic or someone who is a little bit larger than the average Japanese person, then it might be a bit of a squeeze. Now, moving on to our medium budget, we’ll take a look at modest two to three star hotels. Now, looking at Shinjuku here at these two hotels real quick, the total price per night is $145 for the Super Hotel in Shinjuku Kabuki Cho and $145 for the Shinjjuku Urban Hotel. And looking at Shibuya real quick, it is $217 for the Shabuya Tokyo REI Hotel and 173 for the Grand Bell Hotel in Shabuya. So, we’ll take a price of roughly around $170 per night for six nights. And that brings us to a total of $1,020 for hotels for two people for this medium budget here. Now, the prices of hotels usually do factor in two people, whereas the bunks and the capsules from before are per person. Now, for the high budget, and we are going to look at four to fivestar hotels during cherry blossom season. And you can already see that prices are all over the place. The Hotel Gracery in Shinjuku with the famous Godzilla statue is $33 per night, while the Bellow Star Tokyo is nearly 1,000 per night. So obviously depending on your level of luxury, the prices will differ. But let’s take $400 per night for six nights, which will add $2,400 to our total. The one thing about luxurious travel is it’s a little hard to get an average here because there’s really no ceiling to it. You could spend as much as you want. So again, for all of this, I’m going to try to generalize it and give you an idea of what it would look like to travel comfortably, but if you want to fly first class to Japan, then that’s going to bring your total up a lot. But go for it. For the medium and high budget, we have to add another week of hotels as well. In order to see something different from Tokyo, we will next go to Kyoto and do a day trip to Osaka to see the city there, but we’ll keep our stay in Kyoto for simplicity sake. So, looking at the hotel prices, they do range a bit here, but it looks like we can get a 2 to three star hotel for around 110 per night. So for seven nights we will add $770 to our medium budget for the high budget four to fivestar hotels because we are looking during cherry blossom time prices are quite high and we are looking at around $500 per night. So $3,500 total added to our high count. Remember it does depend on the season that you travel as well. For example, here the five-star Mitsui Hotel in Kyoto is around $89,000 yen or $576 per night in early March. But as Cherry Blossom season kicks in at the end of March, prices go up to a staggering $190,000 yen or $1,230 per night. So, the season does matter a lot. So, looking at these numbers, it may be a bit shocking as we’ve just factored in flights and hotels, and it’s already kind of steep, but I’m trying to knock out all of the big items first. So, these numbers will calm down a bit as we start factoring in other things such as transportation, food, etc. So now let’s factor in transportation which again is a bit hard to generalize depending on how much travel you are doing and to where but for the medium and high budgets we are going from Tokyo to Kyoto via the bullet train which will cost an average of around $15 each way with a slight variation depending on when you are traveling. Going to Osaka from Kyoto will cost you around $24 each way. So, the total for the bullet train will cost you around $258 for transportation per person. And again, since that is per person, we will double this and add it to our medium and high budget trips. For the high budget trip, if you wanted to on the Shinkansen, you can upgrade to the green car, which is the more luxurious option, and is kind of the equivalent of domestic business class, if you’ve seen that. They’re basically bigger seats that are more comfy, but it’s not the international business class, which is the full lay flat seats. Some of the Shinkansen services also have Grand Class, which is more equivalent to actual international business class with seats that recline pretty far and are much more luxurious. But for all intents and purposes, for this comparison, we’re not going to talk about those. If you are going to use the Click app to book attractions and activities like I did, you can save up to 10% using my promo code Hongang fam. Links in the description below. Now, one other thing that we have to factor in is transportation to and from the airport, which there are a few options here. Taking the cheapest option is the airport limousine bus to Tokyo Station from Haneda Airport, and that cost 1,200 yen or $8. Taking the express trains like the Narita Express from Narita Airport costs $3,070 yen or around $20 to get to Tokyo. And taking a private charter car from Haneda is $22,800 yen or around $148 to $41,000 yen from Narita or $265. Now, we’ll add in these values with our low budget adding in $16 per person for the airport limousine bus round trip. Our medium budget adding in $40 per person for the train round trip. And our high budget option adding in $296 for the charter from Haneda. And we don’t have to double this price since the charter price is not per person. Now, we will generalize public transportation for the 2 weeks that we are here. Taking the train in Tokyo costs around 180 to 330 yen per ride, depending on how far you go. Now, let’s average that to around 250 yen per ride. And assume that you are taking four rides per day. That brings us to an average of 1,000 yen or $7 of transportation per day or $98 per person for 2 weeks. So, we’ll go ahead and we’ll add that to all of our budgets. Now, let’s also assume that you take the taxi at least once a day for the medium budget and three times per day for the high budget. A taxi ride from Shinjuku Station to Tokyo Station costs around $4,200 yen and that is $27. So, we will add $27 to our medium and $81 to our high budget. So, that’s flights, transportation, and hotels for our 2 week trip. Now, we get to do the fun stuff. Let’s factor in food. For meals in Japan, according to ehousing.jp, quick meals like a bowl of ramen can cost around 716 yen on average nationally, or around $5. In addition, hot foods from supermarkets and convenience stores can cost around that much as well. So, let’s say you are eating modestly for the low budget with a total cost of around $1,500 yen per meal or around $10. Multiply that by three meals and 14 days and that is $420 per person. Are you thriving with that budget? Probably not, but you are surviving. on average for a standard non-fancy restaurant meal, it can cost around $3,000 yen or $20. So factoring that into our medium budget is going to bring it up by $840 per person. Lastly, if you are eating fairly nice meals, obviously the range of this can go up fairly high depending on how luxurious you are going, but on average, let’s eat around two somewhat modest restaurants for breakfast and lunch at $50 and an omaz dinner for $30,000 yen or around $200 for dinner for a total of $300 per person per day, which will bring the high total up by $8,400. $100. Obviously, for Omocas, you can go much higher than that, but just bear with me. You will notice that a large portion of the price for all the categories does come from food. So, how you choose to eat in Japan will drastically affect how much you spend. And the price does not necessarily mean that the food tastes that much better. Japan has a lot of amazing food for very reasonable prices. For example, one of my favorite conveyor belt sushi places in Tokyo is Ube in Chibuya, where you can eat as much as you want and pay per plate, which is around $1 per plate, unless you order some of the fancier items that cost a little bit more per plate. And on my last trip, I went there twice. Once fairly hungry, which cost me around $18, and once not that hungry, which cost me around $11. But the sushi there was so good and I highly recommend checking it out for a super fresh and tasty sushi dinner costing under $20 US per person. That’s even less than the budget that we set for the medium tier. And odds are you won’t be doing all expensive luxury meals or all cheap meals either, but rather a mix of each. So this may vary a lot. Now, the last major thing we have to factor in is spending money, which will vary obviously a lot from person to person, but this will also factor in activities that you may do as well. There is plenty to do for free in Tokyo for the low budget. from many free parks like UNO Park, exploring the anime and electric town of Akihabara, crossing the world’s busiest crosswalk in Shibuya, visiting the free observation deck at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and viewing the free light shows at night there, and plenty more. You could spend your whole trip doing free things and then just purchasing some souvenirs afterwards. So, we’ll factor in a total of $200 per person for spending money on souvenirs and then $50 per person for anything else that you may need, like a SIM card for mobile data. This is per person, so this will add a total of $500 to our low budget. For our medium budget, adding in a theme park like Disneyland, which costs around $52 per person, and then another $400 per person for spending and various activities. and the $50 additional for anything else like the sim from before. That brings us to $52 per person. For our high budget, we’ll add in three amusement parks for a total of $150 and then an additional $800 for spending on activities and souvenirs and the additional $50 for the sim and other random expenses to bring a total of $1,000 per person for spending. Obviously, again, this has no ceiling and can go much higher. Now, this brings us to a rough total of around $3,000 for a twoperson budget trip to Tokyo for 2 weeks, around $7,000 for a twoperson mid-range trip to Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka for 2 weeks, and then that same trip, but staying in fancy hotels and eating fancy food for around $20,000. This is again pricing for two people. So if you are traveling solo, it will be a little bit cheaper. Again, there are so many nuances to every trip. It is impossible to summarize it so generally, but this is to give you a rough idea of how much you need to budget for in Japan depending on your travel style and how all out you want to go. I have seen a lot of people in the comments of my videos talking about how they are saving up to go to Japan one day. And I hope this gives you an idea of just how much you will need to budget for a trip to Japan. What do you think about this budget? Let me know in the comments section down below and I will see you guys in the next one. Yeah.

How much do you need to budget for Japan? We will take a look at the cost of a possible 2 week trip in Japan and see how much you should expect to spend on everything from flights to hotels and give you an idea of the breakdown of each expense so you can plan and budget properly for your trip.

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📅Booking Things in Japan: https://youtu.be/z_BNE1G48Jk
🙅My Biggest Japan Regrets: https://youtu.be/yIrJgumgB5s
🛬First Hour in Japan: https://youtu.be/n3tw0ST-8Og
🚯What NOT to do in Japan: https://youtu.be/EXerZ2VOGwA
🛏️Where to Stay in Tokyo: https://youtu.be/NsPVbbf5Gv4
🈹Shinjuku Guide: https://youtu.be/EEDOaxROrAM
⛩️Kyoto Guide: https://youtu.be/mJFqe6HfH1Y

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Chapters:
0:00 – Intro
1:15 – Flights
2:09 – Where to Stay
2:25 – Pro Tip
2:41 – Low Budget Tokyo Hotel
4:14 – Medium Budget Tokyo Hotel
5:08 – High Budget Tokyo Hotel
6:02 – Medium Budget Kyoto Hotel
6:34 – High Budget Kyoto Hotel
7:40 – Transportation – Shinkansen
8:55 – Save Money on Your Japan Trip
9:06 – Transportation from the Airport
10:10 – Public Transportation
11:08 – Food
11:58 – Restaurants
13:04 – Great convenient food
13:54 – Spending and Activities
15:34 – Totals
16:03 – Conclusion

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