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32 Comments
Thank you for the impressive video! new sub and bell 😍🥰😘
Direct with JAL, use Agoda for hotel, saved a ton of money. I'll never use travel agency
It depends on how free or restrictive the travel agency will be. If it is just a small fee or liability contract, it's like buying required travel insurance in some other countries and I'm ok with that.
If the travel agency still controls your schedule and destinations, then no, that's the same as the tour group but without a chaperone.
I love that pitta mask. They're the most comfortable and good looking masks. I'd had them since before Covid because asian celebrities wear them.
If you did a tour with a not so large group I'm all for it. It's the big group lemming tours I want to avoid. No school outing size tours. Tour operator curated travel is fine by me. Thanks for your hard worth John.
Ugh, Japan…..we miss you. I feel like we are in that old commercial where a crowd of people were standing outside a closed store. Seeing us chant through the locked glass doors, “ open, ope, open!!!”
I can't understand why they want to force bookings via travel agents. What difference does it make who makes the bookings??
I refuse to go through a travel agency. I’d rather travel elsewhere until Japan opens up properly.
I pray this system backfires who wants to do this I want to go by myself I love getting JR pass and go where I like last trip went from tokyo to Morioka for the day on my last day I go to Nagisaki then back to Sapporo love just sit on the train booking travel company not for me hope lots of people dont go will go elsewhere love other Asian countrys with less restrictions
I have everything booked refundable for late sept. So any kind of travel agency is not practical or desired. And let's face it any agency involvement is a money grab because it's a middleman which is fine for those who needs the help. I am not one of those. In about a week I will probably cancel my ANA flight and hotel reservations. I'm tired also of all the silly govt methodology and rebooking. The June and july japan tour experiment seems to me to have been pointless and if japan were hoping for some valuable data they didn't get it and wasted 2 months. Maybe in a few years I'll rebook my trip.
I'd pay for you to be a guide for the Shiminami Kaido bicycle trail. You could even YouTube it. What do you say John??? It would be a blast. I was supposed to come in December this year. Set at date for 2023, let's make this happen!
Stop waffling and give us the facts!
For me to travel back to Japan (I've already cancelled the trip I had planned for October), I would want complete autonomy – choosing and booking my own hotels, managing my own schedule, spontaneously changing locations if I'd like to. I'd like to feel that the country I am travelling to trusts that I'm responsible enough do all the right things to keep myself and others safe, and that trust involves allowing visitors the freedom to plan and undertake a holiday entirely on their own terms.
I wish someone would tell the Japanese, that the PCR test is NOT testing for covid. It can not , it was not designed for that… So the test is false, the disease is false and …the outcome is false…
I'm waiting to come but I'm not coming for tourism – rather to apply for a start up visa. I need to be able to come in on spur of the moment as we used to. Visa upon arrival, not apply for a visa, because I don't know the exact date or timeframe I'll have when I need to go.
Not enough! I’m willing to apply for visa but not for an agency to decide my itinerary. All they can do is have us download an app and scan where we can go if they really want see where we were.
I’m still going all out for my flight booked October 20th, I’ll wait until early October but if nothing has changed I’ll rebook everything to April
Can’t wait to return to Japan! I have been going every year for Sakura from Hawaii during Sakura season March/April
I've booked flights for my family (using ff points) for late March 2023. I really hope Japan fully opens up before then 🙏
Hello,
Its looks like rules for a kindergarden…
Nothing for us. We have our yacht in Japan, how do we do to get her back ????
Christiane
Hi John: Thank you for all the information! I know the actual rules/regulations will come out later, but want to make sure I heard you right. Please confirm….
Once they open to individual tourist, you need to book air travel and hotels (as well as JR Pass) through Japan travel agencies such as HIS and JTB (not US travel agencies).
I love pita mask! I can breathe better than a surgical mask.
I am half Japanese and I have family I want to visit. My 90 year old aunt will not be around forever.
I would kind of wear a mask out of common courtesy but if masks and the jabs worked Japan would have the lowest amount of cases of Covid.
Independent travelers are not yet allowed entry into the country. Worthless.
so in about 5 years then…
I made bookings months ago for the end of October because who would really have thought the Government would be this slow? If I have to approach a tour agency for a non-guided tour, that's fine depending on the cost and flexibility allowed. I don't want the travel agency booking everything for me, because I already have.
If this next step is as 'simple' as a tour agency signing off on an itinerary for a fee, that's ok with me, mainly because I'm so damn desperate at this stage. But if I need to fork out for an entire trip that they've designed, no thanks.
Especially seeing as most of those kinds of tour packages have you hotel hopping, one day to the next. I want to stay in 1-2 cities and do a bunch of day trips over lugging my suitcase around or paying $25 each time to get it forwarded.
Altogether a step in the right direction, even though this hasn't been formally announced, but Jesus Japan, pull your fingers out…
It just isn't right to allow their own citizens the crawl all over the globe and blame foreigners who can't even get into Japan as the reason for their surging case numbers. Nor is it appropriate to think we'd spread it even further when we get the chance to go, seeing as international tourism was 19% of all tourism in Japan in 2019.
when you say a&a do you mean American Airlines?
My wife and I want to visit Japan so incredibly bad, but we just can't do it with the tourist packages. Japan is such a once or twice in a lifetime experience, we want to have that freedom to experience in the way we want. We will continue to wait.
If going through a travel agency were easier…. maybe. Is there even a published list of agencies we can go through?
When I finally go to Japan I hope to see some temples in my favorite white clothes.
I am actually an apprentice under Kodo, and will be continuing my training in January. And because I’m coming to Japan alone for the last time, I wanted to bring a friend with me so I hope by January they will allow people in, even if some kind of visa must be provided. But I would like plan on where to stay and all of that because we are both only work part time, so we want to somehow save money if possible.
Hello, I'm from the UK 🇬🇧 and I booked my flight to Japan in December 2022.
What do you guys think?
Would there be a high possibility that Japan will be open for independent travelling for foreign nationals by then?
I really really hope so!
Also, my flight can be re-booked many times and is refundable, which is good.
But in terms of my free time, it will only be December for this year. And I’m really hoping to go because I would like to spend my Christmas in Japan!