Yes, the selected number of days need to be consecutive. Once activated, the validity period of each pass cannot be changed or extended. Reservations need to be made in advance before boarding the train.
Your JR tickets Just a click away. Green Pass First Class. What is Japan Rail Pass? Buy your JR Pass. Stay connected while in Japan.
JR Pass exchange process. Step 1. Order online Order your JR Pass online by following a few simple steps. Step 2. Receive your exchange order You need to have a physical copy of the JR Pass voucher in order to exchange it in Japan. Step 3. Step 4. Start your Japan experience! However, travelling during busier times of year is likely to be another story.
Seat reservations with a JR Pass are free. Head to the ticket office Midori-no-madoguchi , show your pass, and the clerk will issue a reservation ticket and annotate your JR Pass. Just allow enough time as the counters in the ticket office are often busy. Finding your train carriage is simple.
Signs on the platform indicate where each carriage will stop, allowing you to queue at the correct spot. Unlike European countries, Japanese form an orderly queue to board trains. Queue jumping and surging onto the train when it arrives will be frowned upon.
The train departs from the terminus underneath terminal 2 and stops at Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa and finally Tokyo. Seat reservation is compulsory on the Narita Express.
If you are activating your Japan Rail Pass at Narita Airport, the clerk there will take care of this for you. If you have an onward connection to Osaka, Kyoto or beyond, change trains at Shinagawa as it is far easier to navigate than Tokyo station Using the JR Pass to get from Haneda Airport to Tokyo From Haneda airport, you can use the Tokyo Monorail to get to Hamamatsucho station, from where you can continue your journey on the Yamanote line.
All three terminals of Haneda Airport are served by the monorail. As a very general rule of thumb, if you are making at least one long-distance return journey on a shinkansen , it is likely a 7-day JR Pass will be worth the money. A good example is the return train journey from Tokyo to Kyoto. Also bear in mind that JR regional passes are available and, depending on your itinerary, these may be a better bet for you.
Therefore, to decide if a JR Pass is good value, you first need to sketch out an itinerary and calculate travel costs in the absence of a pass. To help you do this, HyperDia is your best friend. HyperDia , which shows you the time of train services along with their price, may not be the slickest website out there but I have found its information to be reliable and up-to-date.
Also available as an app , it is my go-to travel resource in Japan. As a Japan Rail Pass holder, you can use filters to exclude services that are excluded from the pass; private railways and Nozomi and Mizuho shinkansen for example although Japan Rail Pass holders can now travel on the Hayabusa shinkansen. To see if the Japan Rail Pass will be worth it, you will need to enter all of your anticipated rail journeys individually. In return, Hyperdia will display the timetable and the price, which is made up of the train fare and the seat fee.
Although the reserved seat fee is more, for costing purposes the relatively small difference is nothing to worry about. Prices in were used to perform these calculations. On my second trip to Japan, I headed down to Kyushu, using Fukuoka as a base with a day trip to Kagoshima. Osaka, Himeji, Kanazawa and Kyoto were also on the itinerary. And these savings do not take into account other benefits such as travel on JR rail and bus in urban centres.
However, depending on your itinerary, a JR Pass may not be your best option. If your travel is confined to a limited area of Japan you may be better off with a regional rail pass. Depending on the pass, different durations and flexible days are available. Passes from each of these six local companies allow unlimited travel within their respective region.
Thus, for most people, the pass will save them money. Just keep in mind that the pass does not cover the Nozomi shinkansen the very fastest class of bullet train but it covers the Hikari shinkansen, which is nearly as fast. The speed difference between these trains is minimal: usually just a few minutes for the trip between Tokyo and Kyoto.
The most important thing to remember is that you must purchase the pass outside Japan. There are numerous places online where you can purchase a Japan Rail Pass. Once you purchase the pass online, Voyagin will send an Exchange Voucher to you by post which you then exchange for the Rail Pass itself on arrival in Japan at the airport or at any JR Rail station.
You can purchase a voucher for the Japan Rail Pass online with Klook. The app is free for 30 days, so download it just before your trip. When you are travelling on a bullet train you can see which cars are unreserved on the screens, and then find the corresponding number on the platform to see where to wait. Trains are always on time so a minute transfer time is fine. Hyperdia tells you the departure platforms so you can be prepared and head straight to the platform for your connection.
Hopefully the tips above will help you work out whether a Japan Rail Pass is worth it for you. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.
Buy your Japan Rail Pass here. Thank you for your blog of knowledge : I am taking my family to Japan, we will be there for 10 days — you mentioned that you can activate the pass later on? Could you explain that further? Thank you. I think It would be best if we waited 3 days, then activated our 7 day pass. During your first 3 days in Japan take your passes to a JR office in a train station and you can choose your start date and activate it. You get more detailed instructions on where to go when the pass is mailed to you.
We are a family of four and planning to travel to Japan on June 07, , for a week. Would you recommend us to purchase the JR Pass? We are two adults and 2 children 17 and year-olds. It really depends where you are going. You need to plan your route first then calculate how much it would cost if you buy tickets individually using the tools in this post. I use Booking to find hotels and Airbnb for apartments in the big cities and you can sort by budget. Osaka is cheaper than Tokyo and Kyoto if you find them too expensive.
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Skip to primary content. Hi, Thank you for your blog of knowledge : I am taking my family to Japan, we will be there for 10 days — you mentioned that you can activate the pass later on? Hi All, We are a family of four and planning to travel to Japan on June 07, , for a week.
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