Our planning for our usual family year-end vacation spot started months ago in March: I had an indicative period of travel that would span just over two weeks, and wrote up two general itineraries for travel to Japan: one for Kyushu, and another for the Tokyo-Nagano-Niigata stretch. Yep, I was especially interested to visit Japan again, even though there is already a scheduled work trip to a different part of the country in September as well.
The wife was a little less enthused about visiting Japan again so soon though. We of course just did the 15 day trip to the Kansai region in December 2022 which I wrote about extensively here on our blog. Nonethelesss, she dutifully went about doing intensive research about these two regions while we were in Hanoi. After some fact-finding and consideration of travel and accommodation options, we opted for Tokyo-Nagano-Niigata.
How was that? Well, Kyushu, for me at least, is a lot more interesting, even though I’d visited Fukuoka twice now. The Kyushu itinerary would involve a multi-city loop around the large island, and we would be moving between cities of stay every 3 days or so. That would mean at the very minimum four changes of accommodation for a 15 day period. I reckon that sort of logistics would be doable when our two kids grow older or we’re able to travel as a couple without kids: but for the moment, we dread the thought of having to find suitable multi-city accommodations for a family of four. Moreover, the transportation and train network in Kyushu seemed less intensively connected than say around the Tokyo region, nevermind the fact that if we opted to reduce the number of cities we were traveling each day from, we’d just end up spending more time just getting from point to point in day trips.
So, the target region of Tokyo-Nagano-Niigata settled, we went next about finding the best dates, or rather – the dates we could travel against flight prices. In short order, we were shocked: flight costs into Japan have shot up since last December. It cost us just under $5K to get to Japan through Nagoya last year. This time round, the indicative prices were $7K to $8K. We explored multiple departure and return dates, and across arrivals and departures into and out of Haneda, Narita and via Chubu Centrair (Nagoya) again, and concluded that the savings we would get from getting to Japan via Nagoya was no longer as significant as it was previously.
Even more surprising was that the much talked about advantages of arriving via Haneda – i.e. Haneda airport being much closer to Tokyo central and also lower fare costs – were absent in 2023. In fact, for our planned dates, compared to Haneda, it was now more expensive to get to Japan via Haneda. We agonised over which option to go for, and eventually settled on one of two options: to Narita either via ANA or Singapore Air, and both options would cost us $8K just to ferry all of us over. But as luck had it: we found different travel dates via Singapore Air that cut $1.4K off that projected expenditure by leaving Singapore slightly earlier and returning slightly later. This extended our initial plan of a 15 day trip to a whopping 18 days now – the longest so far we’d be having a family vacation. In addition, the returning SQ flight to Singapore for this fare would be departing in the mid-morning rather than late afternoon, which meant that we would not get the benefit of a last full day of exploring. Oh well.
Either way, I suspect this December 2023 trip would be our last major vacation to Japan for a while. As in, when the wife has said out loud on more than a few occasions about visiting Europe, Turkey, New Zealand, and Taiwan again, you get the idea! So, I’ve also prepared a broad itinerary for two weeks in Dec 2024, and to… South Korea.
Still, post to come: a broad itinerary we’d worked out for the moment for Japan Dec 2023!