Japan Review, Tsuruoka, Lake Kawaguchi, Hachijo-jima Island, Artwork Exhibition, Knife Forging

If I could give 4.5 starts, I would. The staff at this tour company took time to listen to our interests and provide an itinerary that matched nearly perfectly. During our trip, the travel planners were able to assist with any questions we had. One amazing feature of their trip was pdf version of our itinerary, sent through an app, that had live links to all train stations and destinations that would directly link to google maps with directions. Everything on the itinerary went flawlessly.

Our biggest concern was during the planning stages of the trip. Our travel planner got a good sense of who we were and what we'd like to see, to his credit. However, there were some conversations when we thought we had decided on something (adding or excluding activities to our itinerary, for example), but our next update wouldn't reflect those changes. Our trip still ended up being great, though we had to backtrack a few times while planning the trip.

Finally, we thought some of the descriptions of our activities were exaggerated. For example, “staying with monks” in Tsuruoka was more like a traditional ryokan, but the husband was a priest. We were under the impression that Monks would be hiking the Dewa Sanzan mountain(s) with us. Another example is that we were told we’d have a private room on a ferry ride, but it was a bunk shared with a bunch of other folks. We enjoyed both the ferry and our stay in Tsuruoka, but the description didn’t match the reality.