Japan Rail Pass - We SAVED almost $1,000 USD in 7 Days! Is a JR Rail pass worth? (11/2019 prices)

hey everybody welcome back to the channel I'm the travel in full I just got back from an amazing ten-day vacation in Japan and one of the things I did over there to save almost $1,000 was to pick up a Japan Rail Pass so when we come back I'm going to go over the pros and the cons and help you decide if this is a good idea for you in your next vacation to Japan [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so you've decided to take a vacation to Japan that is a great news Japan is an awesome country you'll absolutely love it there's temples and shrines and amazing food amazing people volcanoes just scenery trees it's just a beautiful country and one of the ways you're going to see that country is traveling on training now the Japan railways covers probably 80% of all the trains and the train tracks in Japan so there's probably 20% that are privately owned the Japan Rail Pass basically gives you a free pass to ride as many of those train the geoid lines as you want and it's fixed duration so you can get a seven day a fourteen day or a twenty-one day pass so I ended up buying a seven day pass for my wife and I the cost of that was $275 per person so it's a little bit pricey but when you look at the cost of travel on trains especially any kind of distance in Japan it definitely makes it worth it so the question need to ask yourself is what you want to do because if you want to just fly over to Tokyo and hang out in the Tokyo area in the Oklahoma shinjuku hunter tjuku lucky avodah away no there is some amazing things to be done there and you can spend your entire vacation in that area and not really leave that general location in that case then the Japan Rail Pass makes absolutely no sense for you you will not spend enough money on trains locally in the Tokyo area to justify the cost of a Japan Rail Pass if however you want to say go out tour the country like we did we decided that we wanted to go see Shikoku we wanted to go all the way down to see Kyushu so we had some big travel built in in our 10-day vacation so in that case it made perfect sense for us to look at this paddle [Music] like a bird on a tree I'm just sitting here I got time it's clear to see be from up here the world seems small [Music] weakens okay so you can see by that last graphic that we saved a ton of money by buying the GI Rail Pass had we bought those tickets individually we would have spent nearly a hundred and fifty thousand yen Shinkansen bullet train tickets around Japan so all told we probably saved I think I set up almost a thousand I think it's the actual number is close to about eight hundred and fifty US dollars by buying the GI Rail Pass just for that seven days but also you can see we did quite a bit of travel so again if you think you're going to be doing travel kind of like what we did by all means consider the Junior Rail Pass but again if you think you're just going to stay local or even maybe just do it like a one-day trip or or like an overnight to say Kyoto or Osaka once you get if you're going from say Yokohama to Osaka or Kyoto area and round-trip you're going to be about break even on buying a gr pass a Rail Pass versus just buying a ticket at this at the train station and if that were the case I would recommend probably just go into the train station paying the money buying it and being you know all set good to go because otherwise you're buying stuff ahead of time you kind of bring bring more stuff into the into the country go through immigration get all the stamps and all that stuff and then you still got to go buy that essentially pick up your J or El Paso but if you think you're going to go to multiple places in Japan and you're going to want to use the Shinkansen by all means definitely consider the GI Rail Pass so if you think that's what you want stay tuned because coming up I'm going to show you some screenshots and we're going to go online and I'm going to show you the websites and kind of highlight some of the important stuff as to how to go through the process of buying a GI rail pass and if you're not interested in that that's totally cool I understand fast forward about seven minutes or so and I've got a nice montage at the end of this video to show you some of the places and some of the photos of the places that we did this day in Japan okay so here we are online we went to the official website for the GI Rail Pass which is Japan Rail Pass dotnet you kind of see it right up here this is where you want to come to if you see this banner with Mount Fuji and it's all kind of trees here you know you're in the right place and then you kind of go through all the information here this map here it's kind of useful it kind of shows you all the different Jr okay locations now you can actually click three-point leaves this will take you to a regional version where you can buy a regional pass it covers just that area but remember you're buying the big dog on this and rail path so your Japan Rail Pass covers all of these however if you're just going to be in a specific area say maybe you're just in the western region and you may want to consider going to one of these website so going through the website you go here this next tab this is their second tab here well top here about the Japan Rail Pass the big thing here you're most people are gonna be category number one you're at you're a foreign tourist coming into Japan the important thing to remember is you didn't coming in as a sightseer as a tourist if you're coming in on a business visa or educational beads or anything else you're not going to be eligible and you need to make sure when you're going through immigration that you get this over here on the right side here it says this landing permission and in very small letters it's going to say temporary you get visitor that's critical to have you get that sticker put into your passport so when you go to the jr. rail office you're legit and they will give you your GI Rail Pass the other thing is if your deputies entered some other requirements but you can get it prices these are the current prices we got the ordinary adult we didn't worry about the green card green cards like first-class and reserved it's a lot of extra money that you really don't need to spend for at 7 days you're talking 29,000 Japanese yen that's about $275 fourteen-day 47,000 250 yen that's about four hundred and thirty bucks u.s. and then a 21 day 60,000 450 yen that's about five hundred and fifty dollars if you go down a little bit further you get down here again this is sort of showing if you look at the ordinary column here an ordinary car this is what you're going to be eligible for it and skip the green you don't eat it it's too much extra money and you're going to be able to see 99 percent of the time anyways so this kind of talked about what you can get the Hikari he Cuddy Sakura Kodama tsubame these are kind of the Express trains they're not the SuperDuper express deeds that stop over here the Nozomi the Mizuho these are super duper you can't ride those on the jailhouse but you can write all of these ordinary car no problem write as much as you want you get onto slower the limited Express ordinary Express ordinary car again no problem and then even local trains ordinary car no problem so again all you need if you're gonna buy this is just just the ordinary column here okay and then we'll nicely go up to another page so this is the process that you go through you're gonna buy it at a our designated sales office if you're going outside of Japan then you're gonna look at one of these places here so for example we bought from America USA clicked on a USA and then you hit one of these gay TV corporations we actually use the one here out of Los Angeles their phone number is the same for most of the ddb offices McCall and they'll coordinate your purchases basically what you're going to do is you're going to make an online purchase using a credit card and then they're going to send you you're gonna you're going to get your an exchange order which is like a purchase order they'll FedEx that to you so and make sure you do this early enough before you travel if you want to do this and you want to have it in your possession before you go to Japan but you'll have that exchange already can see this little picture here exchange order passport to the debt Japan rail agents and then they'll give you your Japan Rail Pass and you should be good to go so and kind of highlight the point here it's only valid your exchange orders valid for three months for 90 days so if you buy it you need to turn it in and turn it into an Japan Rail Pass within 90 days otherwise expired by it and then sit on up for a year and if you have to cancel your travel or something like that definitely called up all the organization that you bought it from and so you about a refund other than that I said step three make a seat reservation so if you want to you could go here this is a majority no motto Gucci this is their ticket office you can go in there again you don't have to do this what happens is these tickets that depend Rail Pass k2 access to on reserved seating which is first-come first-serve cheating any nine percent of the time that's going to be fine you're going to be able to see parts of the train that are reserved be parts of the Train whether or not reserved so you can get on to and it says right here or is it okay so my last little internet website video crashed on the after five minutes so I'm just going to wrap up to the big thing and main takeaway is you cannot ride the super Express the nodes only in the Mizzou ho but you can ride everything else and if you have a non reserved seat all you need to do is basically flash your Junior Rail Pass as you walk through the ticket counter area and the other thing you need to make sure you do here is right down here it says when you're going through there the depen well test it's going to actually be taped to that little envelope postcard size thing so you can't stick that through one of the ticket machines you have to actually go through am and staffing gates and show them the past i'll look at it they'll check the dates on it and then they'll say thank you very much and wave you through the gate into the Train area some gates are not 24 hours staffed by personnel so you need to be careful and make sure that you're finding one of those one of the gates that has somebody the big stations the bitching content stations they're all going to have somebody working 24 hours or at least while all of the trains are running till you often and then they do say that depending on the time of the year it is possible that it may be a little bit tricky it's seeds again even if you're standing for a little bit it's not that big a deal so that's about it that kind of covers all the areas and the big takeaways here are make sure that you buy your ticket before you get to Japan and make sure that you receive your exchange order before you get to Japan you need to have that ahead of time don't show up in Japan expecting them to have that you need to bring it with you change order passport turn that into with Japan Rail Pass and you're good to go alright so there covers the Internet and we'll get back to may be showing you some videos and some pictures of some of the great places that we visited in demand [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Travelin' Fool

Views: 1,872

Rating: 4.8974357 out of 5

Keywords: Japan, Japan railroad, Japan Train, Japan bullet train, shinkansen, japan train ticket, JR Rail Pass, Japan rail pass, bullet train, high speed train

Id: QBF6mLQbf4w

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019