I’m headed to Kyoto and was looking to book my ticket well in advance. I was able to select my departing time and the ticket type says, “ regular ticket (includes round trip basic fare)”. What does this mean? I’m confused on limited express and basic fare and if I am booking the ticket for round trip. Would appreciate any help!
5 comments
“Basic fare” is just the fare from station a to station b without using any shinkansen or express trains, which have additional seat fees. So “includes basic fare” means the ticket is for both the fare and shinkansen seat.
You purchase 2 tickets for the shinkansen.
-1 you purchase the basic fare between the 2 stops
-2 you reserve and purchase the seat on the shinkansen
You’ll use the basic fare tickets getting into the station, onto the train, and out of the station. The shinkansen ticket will be used to get onto the shinkansen and out of the shinkansen. (different gates inside the station).
>I was able to select my departing time and the ticket type says, “ regular ticket (includes round trip basic fare)”.
Shinkansen tickets contains 2 parts. The first is the base fare, the second is the express fare.
This just says that the ticket includes both necessary fares. If you already had a base fare ticket, you would only need to buy the express fare in top.
The base fare is basically what it would cost to get you between the locations on local trains. The express fare is the extra cost to go fast.
If you are buying in advance, you should use a service like https://smart-ex.jp/ which will have discounts for early-reserved tickets.
note: you can’t automatically buy round-trip tickets with it, unless its on a route that specifically supports this (very few do), so you just buy an outgoing and return ticket in 2 separate transactions.
easiest way is to go to the green ticket office (みどりの窓口/midori no madoguchi) and book your tickets with the station staff)