Hi all – thanks to anyone who can help. Myself and a party of 5 others will be looking to travel in early 2026. I will share the itinerary at a later date for advice but for now is ‘klook’ the best app to book day excursions/activities/train tickets. I like the idea of using one app to book all. Thanks!
by Cere8
4 comments
I’m not sure that Klook gets you access to all that much beyond some passes and attractions/tours. It’s useful, sure, but I don’t know if it can be the main app for coordinating all your bookings.
I typically try not to buy group tours unless it’s like a specific thing like “2 hours on a shrimping boat” or something like that. I wouldn’t go on a day trip like Hakone as part of a group. There’s just too much to explore and I wouldn’t want to be led along.
For coordinating travel plans and sharing, we use Tripit. We forward booking email confirmations to it and it organizes everything in one place. And you can use it for any country you want.
IMHO Klook isn’t that useful.
For train tickets, they only have Shinkansen and a few express routes. They’ll make a reservation for you but they won’t let you choose the seats. And to pick up your tickets you have to find a vending machine anyway. And then you have paper tickets.
When I buy Shinkansen tickets from smart-ex or ekinet, it’s just a few clicks on my phone, and I can enter and leave by tapping the same phone at the ticket gate. If it wasn’t an iPhone it would still just be tapping a physical IC card. But no need to find a vending machine, I can just go straight to the platform. Yes, it takes some setup in the beginning (making accounts, registering all the IC cards, etc…) but that’s only once.
Actually with attractions, my experience with Klook was pretty similar. What I got from Klook was vouchers that required me to talk to someone to be able to enter the attraction, when I could just have bought a ticket at a machine or on a web site that would have let me in directly. I basically regretted it every single time.
For actual tours it might be a bit different. In part because it’s easier to find them if you can just search on one app. But I’d never try to use it as my central booking app or anything.
I would highly recommend getting your train tickets from official websites (or just buying them once you’re in Japan). Klook is probably the least bad of all the third-party train ticket options, but they will still mark-up the prices a bit (especially depending on the route) and also often have limited functionality (like not being able to pick seats).
Thanks for the responses everyone. Really do appreciate, will attempt to take all this advice on. 😀