Package Tour Booking Process
Package tour bookings are made in 3 steps:
- Consultation
- Requesting the tour
- Deposit and contract
1. Consultation
Discover. Look through our site and find what kind of package tour you’d like for your time in Okumikawa (though you can leave it to us too!).
Contact. Get in touch through one of the contact forms found on package tour pages.
Personalise. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can to discuss options, preferences, and dates for your itinerary, with additional consultation for custom-order package tours to make sure we can design an amazing tour for you. Please note for custom-order tours: While we do not charge an up-front fee to create an initial itinerary plan, we include a flat planning/handling fee of 15% of the finalised trip charge, charged when the tour is requested and a travel contract is started with us.
Review. We’ll send a draft itinerary with guided tours, experiences, accommodation, fees, etc., and work with you to make changes where we can until your group would like to request the tour. We’ll also ask you to accept the legal responsibilities of travel agencies in Japan, and our terms and conditions before continuing.
2. Requesting the tour
Request. Requesting the tour and starting a travel contract with us happens by email. After requesting the tour, your group will need to fill in the information on our guest agreement (that we supply through email), which is our application form for tours. Please note that we do not charge a separate application fee to request a tour.
Please note: We make our best effort to confirm prices with providers to avoid any changes in price at booking time (after a group starts a travel contract with us). In the unlikely event that any providers change their prices after a group starts a travel contract with us, we get in touch as soon as we can. The risk of prices changing increases if there is a significant delay between receiving an itinerary document and requesting a package tour.
3. Deposit and contract
Itinerary. After we accept your request and confirm the start of a travel contract with us, we will send an updated itinerary showing that your tour is booked with us within 14 days.
Deposit. A 50% deposit must be paid at least 30 days before the start date of the tour to confirm your booking and the itinerary. The remaining 50% must be paid at least 10 days before the start date of the tour. More information is available on our deposits page.
Confirmation mail. After making deposit payments, and after we confirm services of your tour, we will update your itinerary to reflect these changes as quickly as we can. Please also feel free to ask about the confirmation status of your bookings.
Changes to an itinerary can be made after this point, with fees and details shown in the Terms and Conditions documents for the appropriate package tour type (custom-order or offered).
Emails
We use email as the main method of contacting guests and sending documents, as it keeps everything in writing and in one convenient place for you to find important information. As a simple and trustworthy method of communication, we ask that our guests have access to their email account when internet is available, especially when travelling in Japan. Please make sure to check your ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ folders if you are expecting to hear from us but haven’t received an email. At the start of the booking process you can expect us to email you in response to submitting a contact form. This first email is the most likely to be blocked by a spam filter on some systems so please make sure to check.
Through email we send links to information as required by Japanese travel agency law, PDF files for agreements to read and sign, and itineraries in text (draft) and PDF form. We ask guests to save their itinerary guidebook PDFs to their device from their emails, but in the case this is not done, we expect guests to have access to their emails when internet access is available while travelling, to be able to access this PDF.