Japan & South Korea Travel Review, The Demilitarized Zone, Traditional Dress, Local Cuisine, Theme Park

If we were to do it again, I think we might want to do more on our own. I feel like we were a little upsold on guided days vs independent days. For some things, I think we could have just been given tickets and directions and done fine on our own, but since the directions were so lackluster the guide service was rather necessary.

[TRAVEL COMPANY'S COMMENTS]

Dear Rebecca,
Thank you for leaving your review and I’m glad your trip was an overall positive experience! Whenever I get feedback, I try to use it as a learning experience to better my services.

When we were first connected, I suggested trying to spend more time in Japan as going from Tokyo to Hiroshima to Seoul in 4 days to check everything on your list would result in a very rushed trip! Since you had already booked your flight into Tokyo and requested a tour of the Mazda Museum in Hiroshima that was only available on one particular day, I hope I did my best to explain that it would be very fast-paced and I tried to accommodate the requests and feedback I got from you and your family. In the future, I will try to be more assertive in explaining the logistical plausibility of traveling through Japan.

I’m sorry if you feel my advice on your interim international flight wasn’t up to par. Though we don’t normally arrange for international flights when you asked for suggestions I went outside of our service and tried to find you the best value and most logistically sound flights as well as connect you with an air consolidator to help with your booking. Since you were in Hiroshima for your last days in Japan, my research was on getting you a flight from there to Seoul. I was surprised when you said you're your family went ahead and booked a flight out of Okayama! I’m not sure what the reasoning was (perhaps it was because the booking was only made a month in advance, so flights were limited!) but since Okayama is about an hour away and we had to schedule around the flight you had already booked. I can see how that made your transfer day logistically tight!

I wish I could have gotten your final documents to you earlier but as we were only planning this a month in advance, I did my best to get everything arranged as quickly as possible. I will try harder to expedite everything in the future. I also understand that you and your family are very independent travelers, so I cut out guided touring wherever possible to give you more time to explore things on your own. I believe I made suggestions on where you could do things by yourselves and only recommended guided services where you had pre-arranged events or transfers to ensure a timely schedule. If that felt like up-selling, I do apologize! We are a travel company whose business is to provide guides and planning for passengers who want to travel at ease. I can see how an independent traveler may find those services to be excessive and will try to better explain what our company provides in the future.

I wish you all the best and hope to provide assistance and planning for any future tours you may have in Asia!