Tokyo Tours in Fall

Excellent tour leader and local guides on the trail, which really made the holiday. A very good mixture of walking and visiting towns to give a varied experience of Japan. Some hotel rooms are small and feel cramped, and three nights on a traditional futon on the floor using the Ibsen for showers was challenging. Although the walks are relatively short, the combination of humidity, climbs and irregular steps makes them harder than you would imagine from the distances. However everyone in our group was well prepared and enjoyed the pilgrimage. Overall, our highly organised tour leader, David Lam, and local guides on the pilgrimage, Jennifer and Tad, really made the trip.

Just the start of car service to the airport and car service waiting for you on return is wonderful...car service waiting at arrival to take you to the hotel and when departing, car service back to the airport...there is a greeting dinner and a farewell dinner...and of course everything in between...the transportation to every city by bus or bullet train and the scheduling for arriving and departing hotels and meals is so easy to follow...touring the places that were of interest gave us a variety...food streets, temples, Hiroshima, making your own sushi, museums, tea ceremony, nature walks, mineral baths...and of course all my fellow travelers who were wonderful...

Very inclusive and the tour director was very knowledgeable and attentive to all concerns. Also the bus driver was very good. This was our 6th trip with Trafalgar and they have always been on target and left nothing to worry about. Excellent tour company!!

Enjoyed the itinerary of this trip as it brought us to so many different cities with each of their own unique customs and lifestyles. Would recommend this itinerary but they would need to be able to walk a lot.

As a first-time visitor, the trip was well paced, with memorable highlights. The hotels that we stayed at were luxurious and had amazing, wonderful meals with buffet, traditional show stopping sit down dinners and street food crawl. We were exposed to cultural events like meeting and watching a performance by a geisha in training, hearing a special performance by an expert master champion play a traditional guitar like instrument, sushi making and a tea ceremony. Riding the bullet trains was a definite unforgettable highlight. The Japanese people are so courteous, friendly and disciplined. Every place was so clean with no graffiti or trash abandoned all over the place. The sights of Mount Fuji, shrines, temples castles and sky towers were awesome. We loved the visit to the Sake factory, enjoyed the tasting and their generosity in giving us a bottle of sake and sake cup blew us away. We did have time for souvenir shopping but wished for more. The best part of the trip was meeting and being in the company of Ms Natsuko Ide our guide. She was the most hardworking, conscientious, patient, knowledgeable and understanding lady. We loved her daily handwritten itineraries with plans and descriptions of the day ahead. We were impressed with her beautiful communication skills and excellent English. She taught us a few words of Japanese daily that I hope to remember always. She led us through several short cuts and back doors in the stations and parks. She made sure to check the buses so nothing was accidently left behind. She was there to make sure that the earliest guest leaving at 3am was put safely into their transport to the airport and continued till the last one left, many hours later.

Great trip - good to stay in traditional accommodation on two nights - although getting up from bed required concentration! Very efficient use of public transport and good mix of guided and self guided.