Review

As far as where we went the itinerary was good and part of why we chose Samurai. It’s always hard because you never seem to get enough time in one spot when you go to a lot of places, but that’s part of choosing a tour. I felt that the trip to Nagoya was a space filler as we really didn’t do much there. Miyajima was great. It was a great place and so nice to have a couple of days to relax there. It would have been nice to have a bit longer in the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Most everything else was good.

In Shinagawa, the Prince was a little tight, but was fine in general. Most of the lodgings were good and the ryokans unique. Maybe one less ryokan, but I’m not sure which one I’d omit.

Food was good in general and I appreciated getting to try a lot of different kinds of Japanese food. There were some meals where we could not choose our meal mostly lunches where a choice would have been preferred. The ryokan meals were so interesting and the ryokan in Miyajima had the best food.

The guides were varied in personality, but they all did a good job getting us to where we needed to go which was no small feat. The headsets were very helpful if the guide used them which most did.

The pre-tour information and organization was done very well.

The tour itself seemed very organized and honed through experience I’d guess.

It felt like we got a good glimpse into how most Japanese travel without the help we had though. You can’t control crowds, but it was handled well and we were very grateful to have the guides through all the travel. We loved all the Shinkansen rides. It was so helpful to have all the tickets pre-purchased. Some travel days were long, but that was part of it.