Planning to go travelling outside of Japan?

Here is the scenario: I get 3 weeks winter holidays starting from the 23rd of December and for that duration, I want to go travelling outside of Japan (with how the economy as it is right now, it is actually more expensive to travel within Japan). I wanted to go to places where I would get more bang out of my poor abused Australian dollar so I chose Korea and Thailand (with a side trip to Malaysia).

Right, now what? If I was still living in Australia, the most obvious thing to do is to reach for my mouse, click a few buttons here and there on one of the numerous travel websites and presto, you got a couple flights and accommodation booked. Easy peasy! So here I was thinking, “Hey, Japan is a technologically-advanced country; they would have some super duper travel website that can handle everything.” Ha ha. No.

Well first of all, ideally it would help a lot if you could actually READ the stupid thing! I couldn’t but Peter could so he was doing all the looking and clicking. But even then it was a whole bunch of confused jibberish that didn’t really make any sense! Too make the long story short, you can’t book travel plans very easily. Hotels, no problem. Flights, some problem. Hotels and flights, major problems!

In the end, we ended up doing what all Japanese people do when they want to travel to a foreign country – we went to a travel agent. Oh no, don’t even get me started on that (but I will)! Every travel agent company usually has set packages for certain popular destinations like South Korea, Bangkok, Singapore, etc. It includes cheap (or so it seemed; more later) flights and accommodation and is for a set number of days. Too bad you need a PhD. to figure it out their travel package brochures! There were all sorts of colour-coded boxes with a billion different prices in another zillion small tables that needed a magnifying glass to read! Argh! Eventually I figured it out (頭がいいだけど…), chose the cheapest plan, talked to the agent, everything all hunky-dory, then was slapped with a massively expensive price after adding flight taxes, fees etc, of course. I went through all that trouble only to not book the stupid package in the end! I had a few choice words that I wanted to say, let me tell you.

So how did I book my trips eventually? What I should have done from the beginning: went to an international travel website like expedia.com, chose where I wanted to go, click here click there and paid for it. No mess, no fuss. Thank goodness for travel websites that actually work and make sense! Now I don’t mean to rant on and on about how ineffective some of Japan’s sites are (how else should I rant my rage and frustration) but seriously, they still have a long way to go before things get done efficiently without having to go through the middle man. Besides, consider this a lesson for future ICSers who want to travel when they have the opportunity. Don’t make the same silly mistake as I did!