JR Pass – Buying Official Online Question

8 comments

1. The official JR website only lets you purchase the pass from a month before you plan to start using it, so it would be sometime in July for you. You can start reserving seats from a month before the date you wish to reserve seats as well.

   Before that I don’t believe you can reserve a JR pass from the official website, but someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. When I tried to buy I could not before 30 days prior to the trip.

2. Can you post the actual site please? To do what you describe would be very handy.

   I dont know what actual site you’re using, but I was under the impression you bought the voucher in your home country and then exchanged the voucher for the pass to receive and activate the actual pass once in Japan at a JR station office. Fairly sure that is what we have done on our trips there.

   Once you have an actual pass in hand, it is my understanding the clock is ticking on your 7 /14 days or whatever you purchased.

3. Unless your travelling in a very high traffic period, like golden week (early May) or Obon (august/September) you can usually reserve seats on the day or the day before.

   We came home from Japan just over a week ago and it’s what we did, often we’d only reserve our forward journey and just book our return trip an hour or so before we wanted to travel

4. I am traveling to japan in early April and needed to reserve seats for oversized bags, the 1 mth prior only showed 5 cars available for booking with 5 seats per car. (I looked almost exactly as soon as booking opened up) the system said few seats available but am not sure if that’s due to each car only having 5 seats or because it was already booked up.

5. https://youtu.be/jNkThRD1ZK4

   This is the most detailed information and instructions someone made for the official website on purchasing and making reservations.

   He made it back in 2020 so hopefully, most of the info is still current. I haven’t come across anything close to giving out this much info on it.

6. We purchased our JR pass a couple of weeks ago from the official site- received in the US. All instructions say we have to trade it in at the airport upon arrival or after. Everything we looked at gave different impressions, so a little annoying that we can’t make any reservations until the days before we will be on the train.

7. I went the route of buying my JR Pass through the official retail store solely for the ability to see real-time seat availability on their website through my phone or computer, rather than having to rely on being at a station ticket machine or office to do so. I purchased my pass this past December and began planning several legs of my rail journeys prior to arriving in Japan in January.

   To retrieve your pass at the JR Ticket Office, all you’ll need to show is your purchase confirmation email and your stamped passport. If you’ve already made seat reservations, you can also choose to have those tickets printed out.

   My only regret was retrieving my JR Pass from the Haneda JR Ticket Office. After waiting an hour to pass through immigration, it took yet another hour to get my pass at the Haneda office. If you come prepared and only need to retrieve your pass and tickets, your total stay at the office should only take 5 minutes. However, there were so many tourists in line who had no clue which pass to purchase or didn’t know which trains they could or could not ride with their pass. This created a backlog of confused, exhausted, hungry, and annoyed people. I only wanted to retrieve my pass at Haneda just to use it immediately for the Tokyo Monorail ride into the city. So my advice would be to pay the few yen out of pocket to get out of the airport first, then pick up your JR Pass at any other ticket office around the city.

8. August? Oh god you poor thing

   Unless you come from a hot country that is. Lol