Wonderful Trip to Japan 2025

Japan | Jun 14 - Jun 21, 2025

Shona, our KimKim travel specialist, provided excellent assistance in planning our vacation to Japan. She was very responsive and worked tirelessly on our behalf. We were especially impressed with the quality of private guides that she connected us with during our trip. We appreciate that using KimKim allows us to balance planned tours and activities that we would have never found on our own with time for self touring. In this manner we were able to plan a personalized trip, selecting an itinerary that met our interests and at our price point. KimKim may be more expensive that full self planning, but the quality of planning, care and intrinsic knowledge provided by the local KimKim agent is more that worth the money. We had a small issue arise and the KimKim team was on it immediately.
In particular, we enjoyed a sushi class and private guides who wear willing to be flexible and tailor our tour days to better meet our needs. On one particular day we only hired a "driver" - that driver, Kendo, ended up being so much more - he spoke English very well and acted more of a guide than a driver. We visited Mt. Fuji, toured Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Osaka. Our itinerary included a whiskey distillery, day tours to natural and historic sites, a food tour, a tea ceremony and a sushi class. We also really shopped the vintage stores in Osaka and the fish market in Tokyo. Our guides took us to lunches at local restaurants we, again, would never have found on our own. This allowed us to try local food specialties at very low prices compared to restaurants in touristy areas. We did enjoy the whiskey tour and tasting however, the tour was in Japanese with only minor English translations available - we still enjoyed the tour but I would consider skipping it if you don't have a full English language tour.
Shona selected hotels that were in perfect locactions and that included breakfast in the rate. Our Osaka hotel had a wonderful sky spa. In all I would highly recommend Shona and the KimKim team if you are traveling to Japan.