I was just able to successfully make reservations for the Pokemon Cafe in Tokyo. And it was a very stressful experience!
Reservations open up 6pm Japan time 31 days prior. We are planning on going on March 28th so for me, the reservation opened up at 1am PST Feb 25th. I had the world clock open and refreshed the page right when it hit 6pm in Japan. The website kept crashing and suddenly everything looked full within seconds.
However, I was super determined. I kept refreshing the page. What I learned from my experience with Walt Disney World and genie+ passes is that for technological reasons I can’t explain, some reservation times “get stuck” in the system and it takes some time for it to be re-released into the wild. So for the first 15 minutes or so it may be that the system is totally jammed and seems full, but some bookings may not be completed. I refreshed the page about 20 minutes later and about half of the reservation times were suddenly open! SUCCESS! There is no credit card needed to book the reservation. You just need to enter your name, phone number with country code and email address. Make sure you get the confirmation email before you close the page or save a copy of it for your records just in case!
tl;dr Pokemon cafe reservations open up 6pm Japan time 31 days prior to the date you want. Systems get overloaded right on the dot so keep refreshing the page for about 15-20 minutes. It’s currently 40 minutes after reservations opened as I type this and I’m seeing some reservation times suddenly opening up.
GOOD LUCK!
8 comments
thanks! this will help many!
Did you keep refreshing the page of the calendar or at the time slot? I noticed that translating the page to English causes a glitch with the month but thankfully the Japanese calamdar isn’t difficult to understand.
Sounds like people had them reserved, but didn’t complete the reservation process; they weren’t “stuck.”
When I went in the summer I just walked in. Wasn’t even planning to go.
Why does it sound like you need a reservation for EVERYTHING in tokyo… this is really stressful for my planning. Is it really like this?
I booked for February and didn’t encounter any problems, got my preferred slot, no site crashes. I even did a trial run for an earlier date and it would have worked as well
Thank you for sharing! I had no idea I had to book exactly 31 days prior to the exact day I want to go, so that’s really good to know.
Interesting. When I visited in Dec 2018, I just walked in and was seated in under a half hour. I want to say it was a weekday around 6 or 7pm.