← All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life
Saving $30K+ on the Perfect Spring Break Japan Trip with Amy Fox
01:09:43
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- [00:00]
Chris Hutchins
After five trips to Japan, I'd somehow never been for cherry blossom season. And the reason isn't complicated. That week is exactly when every flight to Japan and most nice hotels hit their peak demand. And it's also spring break in the US but we still wanted to try this year. And the cost proved that story right. The version of the trip we actually wanted. Direct business class flights for all four of us. A suite at a nice hotel like the Park Hyatt with would have run north of $50,000 for 10 days. Without points and a budget I don't have, it'd mean flying coach, staying at an Airbnb on the outskirts of town, or maybe just not going. But I don't live in a world without points, because they are the reason trips like this are possible. So today I'm joined by my wife, Amy, and I'll break down exactly how the math worked, the mechanics behind finding the flights, the Park Hyatt redemption we had, and and what changes when Hyatt's rumored devaluation lands and the other important decisions that quietly carried the entire trip. Plus, I'll share more about the custom trip planner I ended up building that acted like a local guide on the ground, and a handful of lessons that I think apply to almost any trip you take, whether it's Japan or not. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a comment or share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click, click follow or subscribe.
- [01:22]
All right, we've been home a week. How are you feeling?
- [01:25]
Amy
I feel great. I'm still exhausted. I think it's gonna take a few weeks to recover, but it was epic. I'm really glad we took it.
- [01:32]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah. So this is probably our fourth or fifth trip to Japan, maybe. I think I had one more than you did in the books, and it was awesome. In some ways, it was better than every other trip because we got to, like, live in Japan for a week and we didn't plan that much and in other ways missed out on a lot of the stuff we were used to doing. We did one trip before with kids to Europe, but they were a lot younger and it was a little more packed than we want. We didn't have the learnings we had. So now this was really it. So I think why don't I start and walk through the booking process because I think that is applicable to any trip because the way we did this was different than every other trip in that this was one of the first trips where we booked everything a year out.
- [02:17]
Amy
I don't think we've ever done that.
- [02:19]
Chris Hutchins
Yes, this was like truly. We knew what we wanted. We knew the dates, we had spring break, we knew them far in advance. We actually emailed the school, when are you going to release the calendar? Because we really want to lock this in in advance because, and I've talked about this before, you can often get availability on international business class flights for at least two, sometimes four or five seats if you book it right when the schedule opens. Now every airline has a different window for both when their schedule opens and when they let you book. And so for example, American Airlines, I think it's 330 days, but they're partners with Japan Airlines, which we ended up flying. And Japan Airlines releases at, I'm going to get this probably wrong by a day or two, but around 360 something days, somewhere between 360 and 364. So you might know that you can book Japan Airlines flights with American miles, but if American doesn't let you book until 330 days, it's not an option. And so we were impartial to how we got there. We were like, we're willing to fly any airline. We were not willing to fly in coach because we have all these miles, why not use them? And wanted to be rested when we get there. Number one priority was not have everyone, kids and adults, not be able to get some rest on the plane because we thought it would be a disaster and we had the miles to do it. There was plenty of trips we've taken in our lives where we didn't have the miles to do it and we were not doing this, flying like this. But that was our goal and ideally direct, that was the intention. And so I remember trying to figure out, okay, who could book different flights. And the options I think were United A and A and Japan Airlines. And so maybe two, three weeks before one year out, I just started looking what's the availability look like day of with the different airlines? And you can Google this and people have written articles on who opens what at schedule open. And so I'd come down to the conclusion that Japan Airlines seemed to most consistently release some number of business class seats at schedule open. It seemed like the answer was two, but sometimes four and sometimes zero. And so I just started monitoring the situation every day. I think it was 8:00am Gosh, I can't remember the exact time that they released because we did the final booking while we were in Hawaii and I was up a little earlier than normal. I think it was like 5am Hawaii time, so maybe it was 8am Pacific was when they released their schedule. And depending on who you want to book it through, whether you're booking it through Japan Airlines or you're booking through one of the Avios programs mattered, whether you could find the availability online, what the price was. So some cases it might be 55,000 points of Japan Airlines miles, might be 80,000 points with one obvious, it might be 90,000 with another obvious. But at the time, Japan Airlines wasn't a transfer partner of Built, and it wasn't a transfer partner of Capital One. And I didn't have any Japan Airline Airlines miles. And A and A wasn't as reliable. It was a transfer partner of Amex, but it just didn't seem as reliable. So I was like locked and loaded on Japan Airlines, booking it through one of the Avios programs. And I was kind of just playing around with, which worked. Finnair's website was the most reliable to find the availability and to book online, even though it was a little bit more expensive. And then all the other Avios programs, you know, maybe you could call it was a little bit more complicated. So my plan was use Avios, book Japan Airlines, write its schedule open, and every day for a few days, I watched and watched and tried to figure it out. And it was looking like two seats. And so on the outbound day rolls up, I'm sitting there ready to book. I get two seats on the flight from San Francisco to Narita, which is one of the two Tokyo airports, and two seats to Haneda. And I remember I told you we have four direct seats in business class. We're going to split two on each flight. And your reaction? What was your reaction?
- [06:11]
Amy
Well, it felt like a roller coaster because the way I remember it, you said, hey, good news, I booked our tickets. And I said, amazing, because I know you had been tracking it like a hawk. And then you said, and they're direct. And I was like, great, it's done. We are good to go. And you said, but two of us are flying into one airport, two of us are flying into the other around the same time, but that's the one catch. And I was like, ugh, I don't love it. It's fine. But it just makes packing for the actual airplane experience different for the kids.
- [06:44]
Chris Hutchins
We anticipated one of our, our youngest child being more difficult, and so I booked me with her and then you with our oldest, who we anticipated being easier on the plane.
- [06:54]
Amy
Correct. Thank you for that.
- [06:56]
Chris Hutchins
So that felt doable. Right. It felt doable that we would book that. And then I told you we're going to set alerts. And my guess is sometime between now and when we take off, two seats on one of these flights will open and we can swap. Or four seats on United or four seats on something else. And in fact, every time I saw at least two seats open on a direct flight from the west coast in a program that I already had enough miles to book it in that was refundable, I would just book them. So I remember there was a point where I saw two seats from LA on American, and I just booked those two seats. Cause I was like, you know what?
- [07:29]
If you have to go down to
- [07:29]
LA and we could all fly four together, that's probably better than splitting and flying direct from sf. But if we had to fly to New York, no chance. Like, if we're flying to Hong Kong, no chance. And so I was like, we've got something. And then on the return flight, we were going to be there for, I think, 11 days. So 11 days later, I'm sitting at the computer, ready to go, ready to book this. And within seconds, the SF flights are gone. It's like, oh, crap, what do we do? And I had already had a list of all the options, and the best I could do was we had two flights, two seats into Seattle and two into Vancouver. And I remember coming to you like, this one didn't go as well.
- [08:06]
Amy
It's interesting because when you mentioned it, I felt just like, oh, God, this trip is gonna start out and end in just complete disarray. And you felt pretty confident that availability would open up as it got closer to the actual departure times for both flights. And you did not. No, I really didn't. I was like, man, given how fast they went and how popular Japan has become, I just don't anticipate seeing anything open up. And I feel like there was a good long stretch of time where every week I would say, okay, anything open up? What's your confidence level? And it always kind of like wavered between 50 and 80, 50 and 90%.
- [08:55]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah. I feel like I was closer to the 90. But you did.
- [08:58]
Amy
I think there was one point where you said, well, maybe it's 50, 50, maybe managing my expectations. But I was like, oh, I guess I'm just riding this roller coaster. Here we go.
- [09:08]
Chris Hutchins
But like I've said to many times on the show, the goal is get some flights at work and that it wasn't economy flights routing through the Middle east to get to Japan. It was flights that we could make work, split up, one change on the way back. We would both actually, in this case, land at the same airport and take off from the same airport. We would just be changing planes in two different cities and actually countries. But overall, it felt like it was gonna be possible to make that work.
- [09:36]
Amy
Yeah, it was definitely doable.
- [09:38]
Chris Hutchins
And that was enough for us to start to plan the trip. And so we started to think, where do we want to go now? We're still a year out. We've never planned a year out. So once we had the flights booked, we were like, well, there's no magical window to book the hotels to figure out what we do. And we kind of just sat on it for a few months. And I remember for the first, probably two or three months, I don't think any alerts popped up. I don't think anything magical opened. And then I very distinctly remember that you were going to bed. And I was looking, I was like, tonight's the night that the Park Hyatt was supposed to reopen their inventory and allow bookings. And so the Park Hyatt in Tokyo had closed for renovations. And that same week, Japan Airlines had been announced as a transfer partner of Capital One with a transfer bonus that effectively made it really close to one to one. And so managing expectations, I didn't really give you all the details. I didn't really share that. I thought all this would unlock and be possible, but I was kind of ready. And I remember in one night, after a little bit of a rocky situation, transferring the miles, they didn't show up for a few days. I called Japan Airlines. This woman that answered the phone was so sweet, and every day she called me to check in to try to figure out what's going on, but it was some kind of compliance fraud hold from the Capital One side that literally no one on Capital One's team could confirm was even happening. But a couple days later, it cleared, transferred all the miles in, and I was ready to go. And the reason I love Japan Airlines booking directly from their program is that they just had availability almost every day. So I knew if I could just get the miles there, we would have so many more options. And so all of that came together in one evening. And so I just remember sitting in bed, and I was like, great, I'm going to sit here and book Park Hyatt. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to book this. And it's not that we knew we wanted to stay at the Park Hyatt yet. It was that Hyatt Point bookings are refundable, so why not just book this? Because it's a unique opportunity where they're going to open inventory tonight. And I remember the first like 10 minutes of inventory, there was nothing. And everyone online and like different chat groups was like, what's going on? And then it just worked. And so I booked the entire week. Every night we were there across two reservations at a normal room using a Hyatt Suite upgrade, confirming us in the Park Deluxe suite, which had two double beds, I think two double beds and a living room and tons of space. And. And I just knew we had Tokyo figured out. Now, were there better places to stay? I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it, but I knew we had a place to stay. And then the flights for Japan Airlines just also worked. They just had availability. Now if I actually look at the pricing. So the original flights booked with avios were about 80,000 points each with about $250 in taxes. And these flights on Japan Airlines were 100,000 or 105,000 depending on which direction, and about $150 in taxes. So a little less taxes, quite a bit more miles, you know, about 20,000 each. But what we were able to do is we kept all the outbound flights booked on our Avios. We just left that going and then we booked four seats together directly from Narita back to San Francisco, cancel the other flights, and now we are in a situation where we're totally set. Now what I also did was I booked two seats on. On the flight to Narita from San Francisco. And you know, you might be asking, why would you even keep the other flight, Right? So we were all booked and only two of the eight tickets were on Avios and six of the eight tickets were on Japan Airlines miles. However, I kept those extra two flights on the other SF to Haneda flight only because Haneda is a closer airport. And so I thought, gosh, get in. Way easier to get to your hotel. The Haneda flight had three cabins, so there was definitely a chance that Japan Airlines would open up first class and two or all four of us could sit in first class. So I kept that kind of hanging there. But it was way more expensive at the time to book the other two seats. So I was like, you know, just let it sit there. And if you look at the value here at the time, booking roundtrip business class flights to Japan non stop was about $7,000. And sure, if you wanted to change planes somewhere, maybe it was down as low as 5,000. But this is prime season. It was April cherry blossom season. You could have done $3000 in premium economy or maybe 1500 in coach. But for business it was $7000, which meant that, you know, at the Avios pricing it was close to about 4 cents a point of value and at the Japan Airlines price It was about 3.2 cents a point. So as far as I'm concerned, great value. Like I'm always if it's above one and a half, good. If it's above two, it's fantastic. So this is fantastic. Now would we have actually paid $7,000 for business class? I hope we never have to find out, right? I hope we never have to make the call between whether we want to fly in coach, not go, or pay for the ticket. And fortunately we never have. And I hope that the miles and points world continues to treat us such that we don't have to find out. But I felt really good about that Redemption value this episode is brought to you by Upwork.
- [14:28]
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- [16:45]
description on the Hyatt side. Now, I recognize I'm saying this with an episode that's going to be coming out right before, probably before Hyatt has kind of rumored to be announcing a devaluation. They announced a large increase in the points required for things. So I'll share both how this looks when we booked it and how I think it will look in the future. So the Park Hyatt in Tokyo was 45,000 points at the time it looks. And no one knows for sure how all of these kind of high, medium, low seasons will translate to these five tiers that are coming, whether things will book at the high, at the top. But during the peak of spring cherry blossom season, I have to assume it's the top, which means it's going to now be 65 or 75,000 points, which at the high end, you know, it's not double, but it's, it's a huge increase. But these rooms at the Park Hyatt, a base room when we booked it, which is what we booked, was $2,200 a night. The suite, which we confirmed with a suite Upgrade award, was 3400. And the suite we ended up getting because we got upgraded on top of that from Hyatt status, was about 3,800 a night, which meant that for us, we were looking at 5 to 8 cents a point in value from our high points. But if we had booked it at the 75,000 point level, be kind of in the 3 to 5 cents, all of which are excellent.
- [18:00]
Amy
Yeah.
- [18:01]
Chris Hutchins
Now you might be thinking, okay, but would you need to have booked that room at the Hyatt. And the answer is no. Right. There were other five star hotels in Tokyo, or even four and a half star, that kind of had all the same amenities, very nice, that you could have booked for around 11 or 1200 bucks a night, which at the current price of 45,000 was still two and a half cents a point. 2.4 cents still good. the potential future values, it could be one and a half to 1.7 cents, which I'd still say is a good. But it definitely comes down from what we saw. And then there were also some really nice airbnbs that were about 700 a night. When Airbnb works, it's fantastic. And while we were in Japan, a friend of ours was also in Japan and had an Airbnb. And it just didn't line up to the expectations. Right. It was like someone took really nice pictures of a really clean place from the really great angles, and it just. Nothing was actually wrong, but it just wasn't what he expected it. And sure, maybe you can mitigate that, finding the best reviewed places, but at the end of the day, I feel like when you get to a hotel and something's wrong, they can usually put you in another room, or worst case, they put you in another hotel. When Airbnb is wrong, you're kind of out of luck. And we've had some experiences where Airbnb stepped in and helped out, but it was a hassle. Even though Airbnb helped, it was not as simple as moving down the hall and having someone come help with your bags. You remember in London, like, we were on the street throwing stuff in a taxi, going to a place for dinner because we didn't know where we were going to stay that night.
- [19:26]
Amy
Yeah, yeah.
- [19:28]
Chris Hutchins
So overall, the value we got was amazing. The alerts we set up for the rest of the flights, we set up alerts on Award Tool and Seats Arrow. I kind of wanted them to compete. They did pretty well competing with each other. I kept them on throughout the rest of the trip. And I remember every time I was like, hey, some seats opened. Hey, some seats opened. I'm trying to build your tolerance for my kind of flexible strategy. And I think where we ended up was once we locked in the Park Hyatt, once we locked in the flights, we kind of knew the trip was going to work, but the plan was go to a few other places. And so I want to get your perspective on where we started with how many days to spend in each and where we ended up and how you Feel about it.
- [20:08]
Amy
Before I touch on that, I will say, having gone through this booking process, I remember you saying again and again, trust the process. And I think now, having lived it, I trust the process. And I think that is 100% the right move. And I would feel very comfortable moving forward booking other future trips like we did on miles this time, knowing availability actually does tend to open up. You just need to trust the process. So anyway, thanks for that learning. As far as how we approached our time in Tokyo versus assessing going other places, we ended up staying in Tokyo the whole time, minus a few days at the end, going to Disney. And looking back, I'm so glad we did it that way. The idea of spending a few nights away in Hakone or Kurizawa or someplace that felt a bit more nature focused seems ludicrous right now because there was just so much to see and do. And it felt despite us not having a ton of plans, it still felt like the days were really busy. And so the idea of having a pack everything up, go to another place on a train and then come back for Disney at the end, I feel like it just would have been too much. There's just way too much to see and do in Tokyo itself. So I'm really glad we ended up using that as not just our home base, but like our only place. We just stayed there.
- [21:40]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, I think the trip ended up being nine nights. And originally we had thought, well, we're gonna go to Disney for two days, maybe we do two nights there. So now we have seven nights, maybe we split it four and three. And I'm really grateful that we wanted to do one thing, which we'll get to in a bit, which was this place called Kidzania, which we'd heard so many great things about. And the English speaking day, which unlocked all the activities for the girls, was on a Wednesday. And our trip was like, you know, we landed on a Friday. And so it was really tough to make it work. And we didn't have so many things in Tokyo we wanted to do. So it's not like we thought we could totally fill all six days if we stayed in Tokyo six days. But we kind of just let it go because we didn't find a perfect place on the perfect days. We did end up booking something in Hakone and then we changed it up a little bit as we looked at Disney availability and trying to make the trip all work together. And I totally agree. I think we underestimated how much time you need to just not do anything and not be able to make plans. And we ended up being fine because we didn't go at this other place. Had we gone, I feel like the whole trip would have felt chaotic because we would have tried to cramp all the things we wanted to do in Tokyo into four days. And those extra two days were the days we had to just go to the park and be a little bit more casual, do one thing instead of two things in a day. And so I think in the future I'm going to say like five days in a place. And technically we did three in Disney. And I think for a place where the only thing you want to do is one thing, that's probably fine. But I think it was cramming Tokyo into four days, especially when one is recovering from jet lag, would have been too tight. And so if we want to do a full kind of three stop trip, I think you need two weeks now. Could you do it in less? Of course. I think we did one trip where in 10 days we probably went to five places. Like, you can do it.
- [23:38]
Amy
I think that was pre Kids.
- [23:40]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, yeah, pre Kids. You can do it. And we have friends who take one week off and go to four destinations with kids. It is possible and I'm sure the more you do it, the more resilient they get. But it's just not the kind of trip I think I want to take right now. Now when they're a little bit older, when they can carry their own stuff, when there are not as many meltdowns, maybe that is the kind of trip we want to take. But in this stage, I think the speed at which we did it, which I will take no credit for, because I think we just kind of like happened into it, was a lot more what we wanted to do than we realized.
- [24:09]
Amy
Yep, I agree.
- [24:11]
Chris Hutchins
And so the itinerary we had was we had Tokyo booked the entire time. We knew we wanted to go to Disney at some point and we started trying to figure out how to make that work. Now I'm going to do the whole Disney thing at the end. But at the high level, what we started to think around was, okay, we want to be in Tokyo for Wednesday for Kidsania, which means we either got to go to Disney before or after. And it just felt like ending on a high note that we knew the kids would be wildly excited about Disney and we thought if we ended on that, it would be really memorable. And so it was kind of easy to structure the trip from that point. There's a lot of nuance to booking Disney and we will get to that. Disney Tokyo is a whole machine that there's some great stories and it's just wild. And so we'll get there.
- [24:50]
Amy
But.
- [24:50]
Chris Hutchins
But we knew that we're going to do Disney at the end. So we booked three days, and we weren't sure how we wanted to handle Disney because it was a lot to figure out. So we booked three days at the Hilton Tokyo Bay. It was pretty cheap. It was a couple hundred bucks to 300 bucks a night. It's on the Disney monorail, but it's not right in front of the doors. And so we kind of had that as a good placeholder that we ended up having to replace for reasons we'll get to. But then we had the trip structured. Once we had that booked called up, Hyatt canceled the second reservation that kind of overlapped with those days. Were able to actually move the dates around. So we just had one booking instead of two, because I think we had booked five nights and four nights, and we needed six nights. And I haven't actually checked yet, but they said that they would restructure it such that only one sweet upgrade award would be needed. So we'll see if that actually came back. But we got it all kind of figured out, and then we just had to structure what do we want to do in Tokyo. So let's talk for a second about what we planned before. Wasn't a lot. We literally just planned Kidsania on English Wednesday. And we'll get to that. And we planned Team Lab Borderless, which, if anyone hasn't done Team Lab, it's an immersive art experience. We've done it before. I don't know. It's awesome. What do you think?
- [26:01]
Amy
Yeah, it's incredible. It's good for every age. It's very immersive and experiential, and it's. It's always changing. So from morning to night, it might be a different experience. And then from one trip to the next, it's a different experience. So I think it's a really great way to spend time and entertain people.
- [26:20]
Chris Hutchins
Yep. So I would highly recommend anytime you're in basically any major city in Asia, or check the website, they have other places. Try to hit up a Team Labs event and book it in advance, because once we did one, we thought we would maybe go do the other. And it was totally sold out, unless we wanted to go at like 9:30pm, which was just totally not an option. Other than that, we didn't book a lot. We didn't even book how we were going to get from the airport to the hotel. And I'm glad we didn't because we ended up changing it. We didn't have to plan anything with data because we're on T mobile and we had five gigs of free data. And I think the five gigs lasted you the whole trip and lasted me all but one day. And I could add on. I can't remember how much data, but it was like $10 a day. So I spent an extra $10 on the last day. And I would have avoided that had I thought advanced to do two things. The biggest one, which kind of probably pushed me over was not saving Tokyo as an offline map on Google maps. Rookie mistake, $10 mistake, not that big of a deal. And you can also save offline languages for Google Translate. So I could have done that and it would have saved a little data because we used Google Translate a handful of times. Both the visual one to kind of like interpret a menu, but also sometimes the live one to talk to other people. And so that was it. That was kind of all we planned with one exception. It wouldn't be any story about how I approach things without one little deep dive, some AI topic. And so I had this idea that a friend of mine gave me and I can't remember who it was about. You know, how cool would it be if you had all the knowledge of everything you're doing, everything you want to do, where you are, that you could just tap at any point in time and it could just know where you are and make suggestions. And I thought, well, we're going to Japan. It's a very confined experiment. What if we took all the things we wanted to do and we could somehow kind of load them in a way that we could access them anytime. And so you had a bunch of places you wanted to go. I had different types of restaurants we wanted to try, but not necessarily the specific restaurant. And so I remember having this long back and forth conversation with Claude that was just like, I want to plan a trip to Japan. I want to eat these seven types of food. Are there any other types of food that I haven't considered? And I was doing this in Claude code instead of in Claude chat. And I'll explain why that's really important. Whether you do that through the app or you do that through the command line, it doesn't matter. And you could probably do the same thing with the Codex app or the Codex command line. But what I wanted to do was be able to build out some database of all of the Places and be able to see it. And so what I ended up doing was we probably had 150 places. It was like, if the kids want to go to an animal cafe, let's put all those somewhere. Here are all the restaurants we want to go to. I don't think we had cocktail bars this time because it was. It never made it on the agenda.
- [29:00]
Amy
It's a different experience with kids.
- [29:01]
Chris Hutchins
Places we wanted to go shopping, places you could go see cherry blossoms, places with really great coffee, and some places that just, you know, were interesting. And the places we had team labs, Kidzania, that kind of stuff. And so I had it all go in. And then I said, hey, could you just build me a really easy website that I could access on my phone where grouped by neighborhood or grouped by category, I could figure it out. And it also knew the places because it had saved this database. And that session I had set up. And this is a story for another day about how. But so I could access it from my phone anywhere. I was. If you set up quad code on a machine, even if you're not at that machine, but that machine's running, you could just use the Claude app. And that's what I'm actually doing now. More using this feature remote control. It was not as reliable before, but it's gotten really reliable. And I was able to say, hey, we're heading to this one place. We're in Hirajku. We just went on a little hike at the Meiji Shrine. What should we do? Nothing's open. We have an hour. And it's like, oh, you wanted to try this coffee. It's actually open. It's here. And so by giving it a bunch of ideas of what we wanted and wanted to eat and neighborhoods, we were in real time able to say, hey, we just got off the train in Shinjuku. It's 4 o'. Clock. Is there any place near here that we could do any of the things we wanted to do? And it's like, oh, you wanted to try Matcha. There was this really great Matcha cafe in the train station. And if you want to have dinner after that, here's a thing. And so the ability to have preloaded it with our own database of all of these things and then query it in real time or pull up this site, Which I ended up saying, hey, could you just load this into a custom Google Maps? And then I could just load it in Google Maps. And so I wouldn't say you use this as much as I had hoped. Right. I had shared it And I was like, I've got it loaded on your phone. You can use it with me. But you benefited from it.
- [30:44]
Amy
Yeah, it's incredible. The bottom line is, it was amazing because it feels like you almost had a local guide with you at any given point that knew us and could curate the experiences we wanted and recommend them in real time, which is amazing. I think the practical reality is I didn't use it because I didn't build it. So honestly, it kind of slipped my mind that it existed. But two, you were leading the way so effectively. It felt kind of like if you have two head chefs in a kitchen, it's not gonna go well. And you were the head chef, clearly, of this trip. And so I was like, yeah, I'm just gonna sit back, be sous chef, and you just tell me what you need, and I will figure it out, you know? And so I think for those reasons, I didn't use it. But I. I saw how it played out in the way that you were able to pull some of these very kind of, like, real time locations and places that we wanted to check out on the list. And it just made it so much more seamless, such that we weren't kind of traversing back and forth going into the same neighborhoods because we forgot to hit some of these places.
- [31:49]
Chris Hutchins
It also works really well for serendipity. I think there were a couple moments where it started raining. So one of the first things we did was we went to, I think it's the Goyan Shinjuku Goyan Garden to go see cherry blossoms. We were like, we wanted to catch it before they all went away, and we spent the morning, and then it just started pouring, and I was like, here's where we are. What could we go do for an hour? And it was like, why don't you check out this indoor department store that has a great place. You can get a bunch of different places to eat in the basement. And by the way, the department store basements have millions of things you can grab for food, and it's amazing, and the quality is great. And then usually the top two floors have a bunch of restaurants. So it's like kind of grocery store food stall in the basement and restaurants in the top. We ate a lot of meals in Takashimaya, the department store, because they just had a bunch of restaurants. And we tried a handful of them, and it was pretty close, walking distance to the hotel. The other thing, I'll say I found that using AI tools for translating more experiential things than signs was Way better than Google Translate. So we did laundry once and I was like, went to the laundromat. And by the way, Laundromat in Japan, one machine washes dries, dispenses soap, dispenses fabric softener, gets it all done in like an hour and 10 minutes with a massive load of laundry. That was amazing because I didn't have to go back in the middle and swap things, but taking a picture and saying, help me figure out how to operate this was way better than if I'd used Google Translate and tried to figure out what all the buttons were. So that was really helpful. It was like, oh, we know what model this is, we know how this works. And it just felt like you were asking a friend that knew what they were doing, which was more effective than the person that was there that spoke English but didn't also know what they were doing. So that was really helpful.
- [33:26]
This episode is brought to you by Fora. If you live for planning the perfect trip, comparing hotels, scoring the impossible reservation, piecing together a great itinerary, you already think like a travel advisor. That's been me for years. I'm the friend people come to for hotel wrecks, hard reservations, and planning for
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that, that special trip.
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- [35:57]
see the latest offer Offer so let's jump into a quick review of the flight, the hotel, and then talk about some of the things in Tokyo. Flight wise Japan Airlines Business Class we were on the 787. It wasn't the newest Japan Airlines flight, but I'm curious how you would describe it because I have one piece of feedback that I don't think would matter to you. How would you compare it to other business classes?
- [36:19]
Amy
I would say it was super comparable as far as service, food, all of that goes. The one thing I appreciated, despite it being an older plane, was the second seat had its own little hallway almost to get into the aisle and so there was no having to step over anything or anyone. And that felt really nice. It also felt a lot more private, which worked really well when we're trying to get kids to sleep during meal service, for example.
- [36:49]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, it was a 2, 2, 2 layout and so the windows were set up in a way that you had to like you kind of snuck in. It didn't have a door, didn't have a ceil, wasn't that fancy, but it was definitely. Put the kids in there and make sure they're not roaming in the aisles as much as they could be. My only criticism was that I'm 6ft tall. I wish that the seats were 1 or 2 inches more like it was to the point that I sleep on my stomach with my toes. Right in the end my head was just touching the top. Like no joke, one inch would have made a world of a difference for me. But other than that, a lot of people talk about how the, you know, most of the international Especially Asian and Middle Eastern airlines. The service is excellent compared to, to, you know, U.S. business class.
- [37:31]
It was great.
- [37:31]
I have no complaints, but it didn't blow me away. I think that we really wanted to optimize for sleep and so we didn't go for all the meals, all the snacks, all the foods. They did do a kids meal, which was very cute but incredibly massive.
- [37:48]
Amy
Oh my. It was like three full adult sized meals.
- [37:51]
Chris Hutchins
It was wild. And we kind of felt bad. We're like, they didn't finish it. But they didn't finish it because it was like an entire plate of potato salad, chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese and vegetables and dessert and some yogurt and, and, and, and it was just so much food. And so the food was great and I would say it's probably better than others. Service. We didn't really experience that much, didn't drink that much. The having the little. I don't know what. It was like a mattress pad was nice. I don't know if that's become more standard. We slept a little. I think I slept more than you. Was that right?
- [38:19]
Amy
Yeah, a little bit.
- [38:21]
Chris Hutchins
So overall, great. Instead of going to the lounge, they offer you, which was the British Airways lounge. If you're in business class and you have any One World status, you can kind of go to all the Loun. Went to the Cafe Pacific lounge at sfo, which was far better than I had expected and had an awesome little noodle bar that had a bunch of different types of noodles. And it wasn't anything crazy that would blow your mind, but it was just a really solid lounge. And I thought we were lucky because I was like, oh, we've got One World Emerald from our American Airlines status. And when we were coming in, he was like, no, anyone could have used this. Like you. You didn't need things special. And I was like, okay. But it was great. Park Hyatt. Why don't you give the review of the Park Hyatt? It.
- [39:01]
Amy
So the Park Hyatt is incredible. The renovation, I think they did a great job. It's stunning. And walking in it feels very welcoming, which I didn't actually expect.
- [39:12]
Chris Hutchins
It's a very interesting lobby. You know, there are a lot of times where you walk into a hotel and the lobby is like on the second floor. The lobby here is on the 41st floor.
- [39:21]
Amy
Yeah.
- [39:22]
Chris Hutchins
And so you go up to the 41st floor in the elevator and there's very little signage of it being the Park Hyatt. At the bottom, you get into this room that's like kind of a restaurant dining area down a hall. You turn, you walk down another hall and then you through a library to get to the lobby. So that experience, I would say if there's one knock, it's that we didn't go to the right entrance to the hotel and somehow we ended up on the other side of the bell stand. And so there was no luggage cart. There's no. So we just dragged our bags up and they felt terrible because they missed that. But we also entered the hotel through a way that you're not supposed to. If we had gone to the front door, I'm sure we would had a great experience. I don't know what it looked like before the renovation. We'd gone there for drinks and I could tell that it looked nice, but I couldn't tell that it was like perfectly renovated. But it's great. Yeah, the room was awesome.
- [40:11]
Amy
It's so spacious. I think both because the lobby is on the 41st floor, all the rooms are above that. And so you get just like insane views. Any room, any direction you have, you've got like an incredible view.
- [40:26]
Chris Hutchins
We are on the 50th floor in a park premier suite with, with at least two sides of views all over Tokyo.
- [40:35]
Amy
The views are incredible and you just don't realize how expansive Tokyo is until you're up that high and you can see, you know, more or less most of the city. But the room we had that we were upgraded into was really incredibly spacious and I think really well thought out in the way that you can use the space, which I really appreciated with two kids as we're not having to sneak around like later at night or early in the morning, which is funny actually. We weren't sneaking around. Our older daughter was up at like 2am, 5am whatever. But yeah, I just feel like the layout was very practical and very thoughtful as far as how would people and families use this space?
- [41:14]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, Aesop Amenities. Dyson hair dryer. Like everything you could possibly want was already in the room. Extra toothbrushes, they had a kit for kids, bath supplies, kids toothbrushes, kids toothpaste. They had it all. I will say the, the suite we got upgraded to, best I can tell from the Internet, is just a higher floor. And so if you use a suite upgrade, the suite you can confirm into is the same layout which was so much space. Dining area, living area, bedroom. Two large beds in the bedroom, but we added a pull out so we had three beds.
- [41:46]
Amy
A rollaway.
- [41:46]
Chris Hutchins
Oh yeah, roll away. Sorry. We Shared a bed. Our youngest had her own double bed and our other oldest had her own pullout. So we had probably the least space, but. But we didn't have any kids kicking us and knocking us around in the middle of the night, which was great. You didn't say the specifics, but the sleeping area was not closed off, but it had these sliding doors that you could close off everywhere and so you could keep it dark and quiet and then leave and go do something else. Sit on the couch, have food, do whatever you want and let the kids kind of sleep on their own. The only knock there is. There's no way to open the blinds in the rest of the room without opening them in the bedroom, as you learned when I opened them in the rest of the room. But other than that, that excellent room, excellent ASAP products everywhere. The cheap side of me was like, I just want to wash my hair every night and condition it and just because it's high quality ASAP products. But you know, it was really great. The staff was awesome. The breakfast was incredible. As a globalist, or if you use a guest of honor certificate or if you book through any kind of preferred channel, you get free breakfast. And I just wish I could eat that breakfast every day.
- [42:53]
Amy
Oh my gosh, every day. I was so excited to wake up just knowing I could eat that breakfast. It was, was so good and there were so many options.
- [43:01]
Chris Hutchins
Like it was healthy options. Like I feel like sometimes in a breakfast buffet the best things are always the sweets. And I just end up being full from eating a bunch of unhealthy things cuz I'm like, I can't help myself. But they had amazing smoked salmon and
- [43:17]
Amy
these like whipped goat cheese with English peas and asparagus. Had. That dish was so good. Good.
- [43:25]
Chris Hutchins
It was so good that even though I would typically want to order like the Japanese breakfast set they had, we never did because we just really wanted to enjoy all the things they had. I will say it didn't change every day. So if you're going to this hotel and you have a few days, don't expect a bunch of new things each day.
- [43:41]
Amy
There's so much variety that you don't need it to change every day. Trust me, it is. Everything we consumed was just incredible. Like the strawberries were so sweet, the
- [43:52]
Chris Hutchins
mushrooms were so good and great added value because that breakfast I think probably would have cost us $150 a day. So I wouldn't go out of your way to eat there if it's not comped as part of Your stay. But if it is amazing. We didn't use a lot of the other amenities. We went up to the pool one day. Beautiful gym, 360 views of Tokyo from the gym or maybe 270 degree views. Amazing pool on 45th floor. I can't remember and I do have one regret. I didn't go go to the locker room because it would have reminded me, which I had probably known, that there's really nice kind of onsen style baths in the locker room. I forgot and missed out on those. We did go swimming. I will say not like a kids pool. Kids were allowed in the pool.
- [44:34]
Amy
Kids were accepted.
- [44:35]
Chris Hutchins
Accepted in the pool.
- [44:36]
Amy
Yes.
- [44:37]
Chris Hutchins
Everyone needed a swim cap, you know, to take a shower before you swim. And it was definitely a pool that seemed like it was designed for people to get exercise and swim laps. That for some hours of the day you don't have to do that. It was not super warm, but it wasn't super, super cold. It was adequate pool. The kids loved it. But we were always looking at like they're gonna start playing and splashing. This is, you know, definitely not a cannonball pool. Definitely not a pool to do that in. But if you want to go swimming, you know, do laps. Great, you know, beautiful views. So that's about it for the amenities. One night I snuck away after the kids went to bed and went up to the bar, famous New York bar from the movie Lost in Translation. Had a drink, live music, great vibe. I wish that you were able to come up and join me. I would encourage people to check that out if you're staying there or if you're, you know, I don't have any specific attachment to the movie, so that didn't do it for me. But it was a really cool bar, great drinks, and I think there was live music every single night. I do think there's a restaurant side that we could have gone with the kids, but we just never made it there for dinner because we were out eating all kinds of other stuff. So location wise, a lot of criticism. People. Every time I tell someone we stayed there, they're like, oh, but what about the location? And I think if you really want to hit all the sites in Tokyo, Shinjuku is definitely far out. Out on one hand it has a few bonuses in that there's a direct Narita express train to Shinjuku, so that's nice. The hotel had a shuttle that ran, I think every 30 minutes to and from the train station. But you know, it's a 15 minute walk from a train station. So if your whole Tokyo trip, which many of ours in the past revolved around taking the subway or the metro all over the city, I could see how it might be annoying to walk 10 to 15 minutes every single time you do that. If your whole Tokyo trip is about just trying to explore things where you don't need to get all over the city and you don't have a checklist, you can do so much. The sheer amount of shopping and eating you can do without ever even getting on the train or taking a cab or taking a shuttle just in that neighborhood is incredible. If you go one or two stops on the kind of Circle Yama Note line down to Shibuya or Haraju, you can get a of lot lot nearby and then that whole Omotosando area, lots of cool shopping, coffee, that kind of stuff. We barely left that kind of area. And honestly, massive kids playground across the street. So like when it comes to family hotels, the Park Hyatt in Tokyo is so close to a playground that any kid could find something they enjoyed that it might be like the best family hotel for that reason. Alone. Alone.
- [47:09]
Amy
Yeah, I agree. I think the hotel itself feels like it's in a quieter part of Shinjuku and that was really nice. Not that we were super close to the streets to hear the noise, but it just felt a little bit more relaxing given how busy and bustling Tokyo is. And I talked with a few families that are local to Tokyo and they said that they have friends that will drive from an hour or two away to go to that specific park that's literally right across the street because you just can't get such big diverse playgrounds in other parts of the city. And so everyone's like, this is the park that everyone will like commit a day to go to because it is just so good. And it's like just outside the entrance.
- [47:57]
Chris Hutchins
And I will say for anyone going with families, there is not a lot to do in Japan before 10am there's some stuff to do. A lot of parks and you know that. But a lot of stores, restaurants, activities kind of don't open in the morning. So having a playground across the street to be able to go and spend time in, especially that first night when our oldest woke up, you know, I took her to the playground at 4:35 o' clock in the morning when I was kind of convinced she wasn't going back to bed. So that was awesome. From a food standpoint, sure. If I wanted to find the absolute best of certain types of things in Japan, maybe I Would need to go further. But if you're willing to have something good. We ate almost every type of cuisine you could have without. Without leaving very far from where we were. And we had this debate before we left on, well, should we take the train? Should we take the airport bus? Do we need to bring car seats? And for anyone who hasn't listened for a while, we have these things called these ride safer vests. I put it up on the video. They're like a harness. You can wear that that kind of converts a regular seat belt into a effectively, it's legally a car seat, even though it doesn't look like what you traditionally think of as a car seat. And we talked to a friend and we're like, we've never taken a taxi in four or five trips to Japan. I don't think we've taken a taxi one. And he's like, well, you might take a taxi. Like with kids, you might take a taxi. I have friends, they take taxis. It's notoriously expensive because I think a lot of people anchor to what would a taxi cost from the airport into town and from Narita to your hotel? Might be a couple hundred dollars. So yes, it can be really expensive. And if you want to take it across town, it can be super expensive. We ended up taking, I don't know, 15 taxis, almost always for a short ride that would have otherwise been a 15 minute walk. But when you have two kids and you just finished dinner and it's the difference between kind of scrambling and forcing them to walk, you know, 15, which turns into 20, 25 minutes home or hop in a cabin tape, do it in three minutes. But we did it so frequently and every time it was like 6 to 10 or $12. We took a couple longer ones that were a little further. But I was surprised when you start to treat Tokyo as like a more neighborhoody local place where you're not trying to trek all over the city taking cabs. Just felt like it worked so easy if you were four people and if you have a family of five, I don't know if they would let you cram in, but probably not. And that would change a lot of it. But four people easy did it way more than we anticipated. And I was surprised. On the flip side, stroller use. Everyone had told us to bring a stroller. You were convinced we needed a stroller?
- [50:23]
Amy
Yeah, we brought a stroller and we didn't use any. It one day in Tokyo.
- [50:29]
Chris Hutchins
Well, Disney is in Tokyo, so technically I think we used it.
- [50:33]
Amy
I feel like Disney is Its own country in a weird sense. But yeah, okay, we used it because we had it and we said, why not? So we took it in through the Disney Park. But the rest of Tokyo, we didn't use it one day, and we walked anywhere between 12,000 and 20,000 steps a day.
- [50:53]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, we did a lot of walking.
- [50:54]
Amy
The girls hung.
- [50:54]
Chris Hutchins
The girls hung, I will say, like, there were some times where I put, you know, swapped some on shoulders or maybe like a piggyback ride here or there. But they clock 10,000 steps a day for sure.
- [51:03]
Amy
Easy.
- [51:04]
Chris Hutchins
So some highlights. Cherry blossoms, do they live up to the hype?
- [51:07]
Amy
Yeah, I actually. I was so surprised that we hit it right, because I thought that they were going to peak before we arrived. And maybe they did just right before. So we have cherry blossoms in our neighborhood. I love seeing them as they explode here and it's like next level there. It's like every tree everywhere you go. The cherry blossom trees are massive and they're just stunning. It's like the wind picks up and it's just like raining cherry blossom petals. It's incredible.
- [51:37]
Chris Hutchins
Part of the reason we actually considered going to another destination was that from the cherry blossom forecast, it looked like we were going to miss peak cherry blossom season in Tokyo. And. And, you know, just generally there are other parts of the country that I guess are more beautiful for cherry blossoms. And there were other parts of the country that were aligned better. So I don't know what those would look like. If we went to a week and a half late cherry blossom season in a part of Japan that's not as good as other parts. I didn't notice because we went to Shinjuku Goyan park and it was beautiful and it fulfilled and exceeded all cherry blossom kind of fantasies that we had. And so I think you can have an amazing time. Even just in Tokyo and had it not rained a couple days, we were there. There were a couple other spots that we thought would be cool. We had one idea of a place where you can kind of like rent these little paddle boats and we'll get to what happened that day instead. And so that was amazing.
- [52:34]
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- [53:44]
Thank you for being here today.
- [53:46]
You can find all the links, promo codes and discounts from all our partners@AllTheHacks.com deals. They're all brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us.
- [53:58]
Let's see, we'll talk about shopping a little later. Practically, for someone who is used to walking around the states with kids where you're like, oh, if we need a bathroom, we're at a lot luck. I feel like you could find a clean bathroom everywhere.
- [54:13]
Amy
Everywhere. They are so accessible, they're so plentiful, they're so family friendly.
- [54:19]
Chris Hutchins
Anyone with kids, they have these seats that kind of make the toilet seats smaller for younger kids. I would say 75% of the bathrooms we went to, public bathrooms, had one of those seats in. It had a place that you could set a baby to sit them down so you could use the bathroom and not have to hold your kid at the same time. Almost every single mall, department store, everything had one of the, like a family bathroom. And it was just wild how easy that aspect of entire Japan was. And when it comes to, you know, bringing waters, if you want to keep your kids hydrated, there's probably not a place in Tokyo that you couldn't look and find one if you just kind of spun around in a circle. So you don't need to worry about carrying around a lot.
- [54:56]
Amy
And we always carry water bottles with us because the girls drink so much water. We didn't bring a water bottle with us any day of our trip.
- [55:04]
Chris Hutchins
Or snacks.
- [55:05]
Amy
Or snacks. Between the vending machines and the convenience stores like seven Eleven or Family Mart,
- [55:11]
Chris Hutchins
you you needed on almost like Within a one block walk. So that was great. The one thing that you did not have anywhere you needed was trash cans. It's so interesting how Japan is so clean and it's probably because of this, but it seems like there's an expectation that you take your own trash. Sure, if you go to a Starbucks, I'm sure there's a trash can in it. A lot of the vending machines have trash cans next to them and a park would have a trash can. But they are not plentiful. And so keep that in mind. If you're kind of thinking American style, oh, let's go pick up four drinks or coffees to go and then we'll just walk and find a trash can on the street. You might not and you might be carrying them around. And so we have this great little super compact, I think is it North Face or Patagonia backpack that we carried around that we could kind of expand if we needed it. I just put in my pocket. And so we had a way to carry stuff if we bought stuff. But honestly we didn't need to bring a lot of stuff around. And getting around was so easy. You know, you could use a credit card everywhere. I will say I was surprised that about 50% of the places didn't take tap to buy pay. So you needed a physical credit card. And then if you want to get around transit the SUA card, you can add it through Apple Wallet. I assume you could do the same on, you know, Android with Google or Samsung. So that was easy. And some of the subway lines you could just tap with a credit card. So that makes it easy. So that solved a lot of the problems.
- [56:30]
Amy
There were a few on the payment side. There were definitely several restaurants we went to that were cash only and I guess I didn't fully expect that. So we actually went to a conveyor sushi restaurant the first night or the second night we arrived and and it was cash only to the point where we had no cash on us because we expected between card and Apple pay we'd be fine. And you actually had to run like 15 or 20 minutes back to the hotel to get cash and then run all the way back to pay. So that's just one thing to note that not everything can be paid on Carter Apple pay. So make sure you have a physical credit card and you have cash with you at all times.
- [57:09]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, and by cash it's going to be Japanese yen. So bring a debit card that has no fee fees. Fortunately and unfortunately brought one, left it in the room. So in hindsight, if you just carried one debit card and one credit card with you, you'd be fine. And the 711 ATMs from my most recent research are the best place to take cash out. And so once that was done, we had didn't have any problems the rest of the trip. And huge shout out to the bank of America ATMOS Summit card because this is our first trip since getting that card where it's 3x on all foreign transactions. And so, so I didn't need to think about which card. I just used that card the entire time and it handled everything. And so that was great. A lot of the other stuff we did doesn't deserve necessarily a call out because, you know, we wanted to eat tonkatsu one night. So we just said, what's the best place nearby? I don't want to say that was the best place. Your AI search will probably tell you the same thing. I don't want to call out standouts. I can put some in the show notes of places we went. I don't even remember the names because we kind of focused much more casually. We did go to Afuri Ram in and we went to Rory Nisha in the Tokyo train station, which was probably the only not kid friendly restaurant we went to.
- [58:14]
Amy
Yep.
- [58:15]
Chris Hutchins
Every other restaurant it was like, here's a toy for your kids. Here's kids silverware. Here's a bib to keep your kids clothes clean. Here's a high chair if you need it. Every restaurant except that one. So I would say skip Ramen street in the Tokyo station if you have young kids. If you have young kids. It felt like if your kids were not going to be wild and crazy easy, they were accepted and welcomed everywhere.
- [58:37]
Amy
Yep.
- [58:38]
Chris Hutchins
Which I think you were a little hesitant about.
- [58:40]
Amy
Yeah. I think our kids are generally very well behaved and they're not incredibly loud. But you get.
- [58:47]
Chris Hutchins
But they're kids.
- [58:48]
Amy
But they're kids. And in Japan the culture is very respectful and more quiet and you respect the community around you. And so, you know, we'd get on the subway or the elevator, we get in an elevator and they'd be chatting and everyone else house is dead silent. And I can't tell you how many times I said shh, shh. I've said shush more in my life over those 10 days than I think I have my entire life. So that was just another thing that I didn't fully anticipate from the trip. With young kids, when it came to
- [59:20]
Chris Hutchins
food, our girls are pretty open to eating other things and so they loved it. Right? We got to try all these kinds of foods and they were open to all of it and they loved it. The quality of the food's good. Good. You really can't go wrong. Like when I say you can't go wrong, you can have dinner at 7:11 and you can. Which we did the first night, which we did. And I think we had lunch at 7:11 or breakfast. Like we had some meal at 7:11 and Family Mart, which sounds crazy to someone who hasn't been to Japan, but the quality of basically everything in Japan is so incredibly high that I think I've had meals at convenience stores in Japan that are better than like good restaurants in America. Especially that egg salad sandwich. People love it. I don't like egg salad. So I'm not gonna say it's great, but I do.
- [60:04]
Amy
I think it's awesome. I also think generally the food in Japan is just more whole, like real foods. So even at a 711 or a family Mart, you're getting higher quality, less processed food than you would here in the States. Now their candy is a whole different thing because it's not regulated with all the dyes and stuff. But the actual food itself is. Is the quality is great.
- [60:28]
Chris Hutchins
So I won't call out that many things. One thing we did take one adult trip to go to Coffee Mameya, which is excellent. And we just kind of got a little reprieve. Amazing option. Like just. It's like a. I won't say an omakase because you don't need to have multiple coffees.
- [60:44]
Amy
But. But they do a coffee tasting, but
- [60:45]
Chris Hutchins
they do a great. I. I was not there that long. It was like nice to just get really high craft things. We did that with Coffee Coffee and then we did that with Kidsania, which was like the most high craft, amazing kid experience you could imagine. And puts like any other kid activity you've done in the world, unless you've done it at Kidzania, which there is one in Texas to shame. Really. I don't know what the upper age bound for Kidsania is. It's probably like elementary school is kind of where it taps out. Maybe the upper end of that's even too high. But how would you describe, describe it?
- [61:19]
Amy
A kid only city in this massive mall space where kids go in and they sign up to do different jobs and these jobs are like real jobs. It's like working at the Tokyo Gas Company, changing pipes and monitoring the gas flow. Or they loved making Pon Zoo. They went to a Ponzu Making factory and they made proper ponzu. They mix the ponzu sauce, they bottle it and then they shrink wrap table around it. It is so legit. Like they're using real machines to do these things. And then they actually take away these
- [61:58]
Chris Hutchins
real products they worked at. Was it Mos Burger? I can't remember the name of it. Mo's Burger.
- [62:03]
Amy
Yeah.
- [62:04]
Chris Hutchins
And they made burgers and then we ate them and so it was just so cool. So the kids sign up for jobs. They have everything. They. You could be a flight attendant, you could be a dentist, you could be a heart surgeon, a nurse nurse taking
- [62:17]
Amy
care of babies in a nursery at the hospital.
- [62:19]
Chris Hutchins
And you earn money for most of your jobs and you have to open up a bank account and then you get a little Kidzania debit card. But the parents aren't involved at all. The parents do not go in any of the activities. You can't go in the bank with them. They have to go open the bank account themselves. At the end of the day they have to go to this little department store to spend their money. No parents there. Now you can't just drop your kids off. You actually have to stay with them. But you kind of are staying kind of watching in from afar.
- [62:45]
Amy
You have to stay. If your kids are, are six or younger, your youngest kid is six or younger, after that you can.
- [62:52]
Chris Hutchins
I didn't, I missed that cuz that we didn't qualify.
- [62:54]
Amy
It doesn't apply to us.
- [62:55]
Chris Hutchins
But I would say it needed some help figuring out the scheduling because you kind of show up and it's like, well, what do you want to do? Well, this one's not available till 1 o'. Clock. And some of the most popular activities sold out really fast. Like if you wanted to be a firefighter, get there early and go sign up for that first. And I would say I could probably do a whole 10 minute episode of On Optimizing Kidzania because it's like I kind of feel like I dialed it in. But on the flip side, I actually think that we went on English Wednesday because half the activities are in English. That said, if you go any other day, I think there's only like five or six activities in English but you can book it such that they're all lined up. So you do those five English activities and sure you don't get the same ability to choose which activities you have, but you also don't have the stress of having to race around and figure out which activities available available now and which one are you going to do next. I think that if we did it again, I'm not sure we need to go on English Wednesday, especially for your first time, unless your kid's dead set on one specific activity, I would strongly say you could go any day and just line up for those five activities that they have for that day and it might actually be a better experience.
- [64:07]
Amy
Yeah, I agree. I think going on English Wednesday and going over a spring break week, it actually felt like the real life Tokyo. Outside, it was bustling, it was busy, it was chaotic. There were sounds from like fire trucks driving by, like actual fire trucks with kids in them driving around the city. Like it was madness in a really good, energizing way. But I think it would be a lot more palatable for a adults to manage through the day with their younger kids going on another day.
- [64:44]
Chris Hutchins
But if you have kids and they're of an age where this is in any way interesting and you're in Tokyo, I feel like you'd be missing out if you didn't check it out.
- [64:52]
Amy
Yeah, it is a very unique experience. And when we finished our trip, we asked what the most memorable experiences were and one of them was Kidzenia.
- [65:01]
Chris Hutchins
Yeah, now there is one. I can't remember where it is. I want to say, like, I'm going to get this wrong. Maybe Frisco, Texas or something like near Dallas. Honestly, I don't remember. But if you're taking a trip to Texas or you live in Texas, look it up. If it's anything close to the experience in Japan, it is worth spending a day there. And honestly, if we were even within an hour drive, we'd probably check it out again on the States side and compare it. So that was one that I thought was really awesome and I'm really glad we got to do it. Now, before we get to Disney, I'm going to talk a little about the last day because there were two things that happened. So one was we were trying to figure out how to get from Shinjuku to Disney Hotel we were staying at. And Japan is well known for this service. I believe it's Taku Bin, where you can forward all of your luggage from one city to another. And depending on how far you're going, it can take one or two days. And it avoids the hassle of having to lug all of your bags on the train to the airport, you know, on the subway and all that. And so I've always wanted to do it. The downside is, is you don't have your bags for a day. You could ship all your bags, but then you have to pack a day
- [66:06]
Amy
bag and well, it's like a 24 hour almost. Right, so it's, you don't have your bags for that night and then the next day.
- [66:15]
Chris Hutchins
Yes. So you've got to cover that. And for some cities it's two days. For anyone who doesn't know Japan is very reliable in things like they have public apologies if the train's like minutes late. So, you know, I wouldn't worry that it's not going to get there. This doesn't feel like a system like throw checking your bags on an airline where they might not show show up. The challenge being that, you know, you check your bags and you just need to kind of stay on top of making sure you have everything you need until you get to them. But within Tokyo, to get to Disney, we were going to have to, in the most simple way, take the train. The subway was kind of crowded during times of the day. Like we had days where it was very crowded. We had four carry ons and so we didn't have to check bags on the flight out. We bought a few things. So we had an extra duffel bag. We, one of our hacks, thanks to you, is always bring like a super collapsible big duffel bag that lets you bring extra stuff home if you have it. And it just seemed like a lot. And so we like, you know what, we can compress everything we need into one bag for the day and the night and the next day and we'll ship all our bags and they'll be waiting for us at the Disney Hotel. But I, I was surprised, and maybe surprised is the wrong word, but I was like, oh, how much is this going to cost? It was like $20 a bag, but we didn't have huge bags, so it was going to be almost, Almost, I think 80 ish dollars was the cost for all of our bags to get there. And then you threw out there, you're like, well, how much is a taxi? And in my mind I just had this feeling like taxis are so expensive. But Disney wasn't that far. I think it was like five or six miles away. And so the cab was going to be somewhere around $100. And on one hand I was like, gosh, with the subway only costing like $6 and the, you know, the taxi costing $100, it seems crazy. But if we wanted to afford our bent bags, you know, 15, 20 a bag seems somewhat reasonable. But now it's gonna be $80. So the incremental cost to take the taxi was just $20. It just seemed like that was such an easy solution that we probably would have hemmed and hot on for a while in our past lives. And I'm kind of proud that we were able to make that decision and just do it. I think you probably made it faster in your head than I did.
- [68:09]
Amy
Yeah, it wasn't even a question for me, but I appreciate your willingness to try it out because the incremental cost was just so, so nominal. Given how much easier it was.
- [68:22]
Chris Hutchins
It made our lives so easy. Yeah, we fit all the bags in one taxi. We got there in 30 minutes. It was half the time. And straight door to door with bags. Yeah, it was amazing.
- [68:32]
Okay, I'm gonna stop here. That was part one. In part two, the trip takes a turn. We end up spending the morning of our last day in Tokyo in a Japanese hospital. And I'll walk through what actually happened, what it cost, which honestly shocked me in both directions, and the credit card benefits I wish I'd thought about before we left and what I'm changing for every future trip. Plus what made shopping in Japan actually worth doing if you usually never shop on vacation. And a quick breakdown of the two Disney parks, one of which is often described as the best Disney park in the world. If you enjoyed this one, please share it with a friend. Leave a comment or review or email me@podcastlthehacks.com that's it for this week. I will see you next week.
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