How do people justify JR passes?

29 comments

1. I’m going to allow this post because it’s sort of like a little pre-trip report and because it shows a view I don’t think we see a lot on this subreddit.

   That said, the short answer is that the JR Pass is not actually a good deal for a lot of people. For a lot of itineraries, the 7-Day JR Pass and 14-Day JR Pass just about break even (at least with the current pricing, though definitely not with the new pricing). A lot of people get it because they’ve seen on social media or travel blogs that it’s a good deal, and they don’t really look further into it.

   You’ll notice regulars in this subreddit often discouraging people from getting a JR Pass based on their itinerary, or encouraging people to use calculators and make sure it’s valuable to them. While there is the rare tourist who can make good use of a JR Pass with lots of shinkansen travel, I’d argue that most tourists simply don’t need it. An IC card + tickets bought on SmartEX/Eki-net/etc. will suffice for a lot of itineraries, and the user will have the flexibility to book things online and use whatever trains they want.

   So I would say that, no, you aren’t missing anything. There’s simply _a lot_ of content out there that pushes people toward the JR Pass. I imagine a lot of it will evaporate in the next month, though.

2. The 7-day pass in the old pricing scheme was very close to a round-trip from Tokyo to Kansai. It was very easy to say “I’m going to Kyoto, I can just use this for the Shinkansen and also some local JR usage to Nara.” and have it be more than worth it. In the case of losing ~45 minutes each way to the slower train, that generally was not a concern, as it was just vacation.

   The above is probably the most common use case of these passes that I’ve seen – not an extended trip where significant differences in time matter.

   I will also note that for many people, just being able to get on the train and go without worrying about tickets/prices is a much bigger get for many people with anxiety. My wife hates trying to figure this stuff out and we’ve purchased rail passes in other countries (not just Japan) for this reason so she can easily just hop on and hop off without worrying about stored value.

3. You’re seeing people who prepare for a trip at all, what you don’t see are the people who don’t and think the price of the JR Pass will be justified because they don’t actually know how much train rides cost.

   I also see a lot of people who are completely frozen in fear at the prospect of taking a train or public transit at all, probably because they don’t come from places where they have access to that kind of stuff. They see the JR Pass as a convenience because it (mostly) removes having to think about stuff like tickets (having helped multiple other tourists at ticket machines before because they didn’t know what they were doing). These people also know very little about reserving seats to begin with so they just hop on whatever train they want and are only told onboard they must have seats or to move to unreserved cars.

4. JR pass didn’t make sense for me either despite taking quite a few trains. I guess saves money for people with extremely compressed itineraries like Tokyo-Kyoto-Hiroshima-Tokyo in a week.

5. Bit offtopic but I see loads of American tourists in Europe who are absolutely clueless how to use public transport / have never been in a train before. So I think it‘s appealing for those to pay extra and don‘t have to worry about getting single tickets.

   But nevertheless I think the 14- and 21 day passes are still a great bargain but after the price hike they will be useless. Unfortunately this will probably lead to much more airtraffic in Japan.

6. My friends and I have done winter snowboarding trips in Hokkaido for many years. Fly into Tokyo, hang out a few days, cheaply fly up to Sapporo/Niseko. Do our mountain time, then activate the pass, and then spend the balance of the next several weeks just training around to different cities, booking Airbnb as we go. That all-day ride from Hokkodate to Tokyo really is a great transition and and a beautiful ride. You can see waves crashing on snow. We love the Green car and the flexibility. That leg alone justified a big part of the cost with prices before this year.

   Now, however, since the prices are waaay up and for the first time we’re really looking at calendars and costs for our next trip, we’re probably going to agree with everything said here and skip the JR pass this year.

   So yeah, we never had any trouble justifying the cost to ourselves, due to how much we love the train travel and the sheer flexibility of it. But those days may be over now.

   We basically had rent control and got evicted.

   Edit: oh man, I almost forgot! Now the pass is just a regular magnetic train ticket you have to keep track of! It used to be this big laminated thing you would have trouble losing and would flash at gate agents while you breezed by. We also just figured out on our most recent trips how to book our seats using the the machines instead of waiting in line for counters. 😐

7. I ALWAYS buy either a 7 or 14-Day JR Pass every time I go. It saves me so much money and time. The convenience factor alone is huge. It’s foolish not to buy one in all honesty. But with the upcoming massive price increase in October, it’ll be essentially useless for 90% of tourist itineraries thereafter.

8. I’ve been to Japan about 3 times now and am going again soon in September. Since we’ve done all the touristy stuff before and want to take a lot of out of the way trips on the Shinkansen we found for the first time that a jr rail pass would benefit us with the amount of times we’re taking the Shinkansen. I think it was roughly 400 Canadian each. Otherwise most people see Osaka Kyoto and Tokyo and don’t realize it’s cheaper to use an IC card and buy Shinkansen tickets

9. It really seems like the majority of Japan’s rail passes, even outside of the JR passes, are not worth it financially.

   I have been looking up local day passes and other passes for a 90 day trip, and after going through Google maps to add up transportation cost and comparing to a lot of these passes, it seems like the majority are over priced OR they only last like, 3 days so you can’t spend time seeing the majority of the area they cover.

   The ones I’ve found that MIGHT be worth it are passes that are provided for city travel and offer free entry into tourist spots, or discounts, like the Hakone Free Pass.

10. Is it worth me getting a JR pass for 7-days? I am going from Tokyo to Hiroshima, then Kyoto/Osaka and back to Tokyo. I am guessing it’s worth it to go and get the JR pass but not 100% sure.

11. In 2019, I justified a 21 day JR pass when we did Tokyo – Osaka (with day trips to Nara, Kyoto, Himeji), then off to Kanazawa and then back to Tokyo. In addition, I did use it for JR trains inside of Tokyo and Osaka, as well as the Kyoto bus. I think the calendar gave us a “close call” on the 21 day pass. So we went ahead with it.

    in 2023, I only got a 14 day JR pass as I did a quick kansai trip from Tokyo (going to Kyoto and Hiroshima). Then i used it in Hokkaido for sapporo, otaru, hakodate, and then taking the train from hakodate to sendai and to Tokyo. the calculator actually told me that a 21 day pass would pay off, but since we had tokyo days at teh beginning and end, the 14 day pass made much more sense.

    The JR pass just gave us the flexibility to head to the train station and not worry about trying to figure out the train system too much. I purchased from the official retailer meaning I could book all my seats in advance. I got all those tickets printed the day i picked up the JR pass and i stored it away for use. It gave us extra time and we didn’t have to worry about exchanging tickets at the office.

12. Generally, I get a JR Pass if I am going to be crossing more than one regional area.

    So Last trip, I could have done either a 2 week rail pass or paid out of pocket for Hakone to Kyoto/Kyoto to Tokyo and gotten a 5 day JR East Pass.

    I picked the pass because I was already taking a Hikari from Hakone to Kyoto, so it’s not like I could have used a Nozomi. Since I had the pass I did an unplanned day trip between Kyoto and Nagoya.

    I like going to Tohoku and I like seeing friends in Kansai. I’ve had bad luck with open jaw tickets. I’ve done them before, but they either involved: taking a flight at 6:00 am in the morning to change to a flight in CA to get to KIX or changing in Japan. I would have considered an open jaw in December 2022, but Hawaii to KIX, Tokyo to US Mainland was counting as 2 one ways because I was not going back through Hawaii and the price was incredibly high, much higher than just getting a 2 week pass. I had good luck in 2019 changing in Narita for a flight to Itami, but I’ve also had several delays and since my flight gets into Japan in mid to late afternoon already, that puts me at risk of being stuck in Tokyo. The additional cost of the pass, wasn’t that much higher since again, I often go to Tohoku later in the trip. Now with all passes going up, I might re-think the risk of an open jaw and I am just more willing to pay out of pocket to get to Koriyama or somewhere in Fukushima and then use a TEP driving Pass. (As JR East passes are going up too, and then I am not stuck with the 5 day limitation.)

    I personally, like to be in Kansai as much as possible when I first arrive in Japan to take advantage of jet lag. I find there is just not as much to do in Tokyo at 8 or 8;30 in the morning outside of heading to somewhere else.

    For the new pass prices, I do not recommend this itinerary, but you could easily plan to stay in Tokyo and day trip to Matsushima (100% doable, I did it.) price ~22,000 yen round trip, do a day trip to Nagoya ~22,000 yen round trip, and do a long day trip to Kanazawa or a shorter day trip to Nagano. Either one will more than take you over the 50000 yen price, heck you don’t even have to do something that extreme, just make a 3rd day trip to Nikko and you cover the 50,000 yen. If you’re in Japan for say 9 days, and are only in Tokyo, that 7 days could work.

    I think it is harder to make work in Kansai, since the JR West passes are not going up as much and they cover a lot of the places you would want to go by shinkansen, though once the Hokuriku shinkansen actually ends in Osaka, it might be possible to make the new pass prices work out of Kansai.

    I 100% agree with u/SofaAssassin, there are people who just get a pass without thinking about whether it saved them money. Someone posted here a trip that never went further than I think Hakone, Nikko and Kawaguchiko, and yet they got the 7 day pass. So there are even people planning and posting itineraries here who work under the assumption they need a pass even when they do not. I just recently argued with someone about how there was no way they were going to save money with the pass (even under old prices) and had to do all the math to show them.

    People just hear it is a good deal and assume it is for everyone.

13. I didn’t use the nationwide pass, but I got a 7 day Kyushu pass (20k) and a 7 day Setouchi pass (21k) and they both paid off (and had no restrictions on shinkansens), although the Kyushu one was only because I did a bizarre routing. I think when I calculated it I could’ve gotten the 14 day national pass and still had it pay off, but the two regionals were cheaper.

    The factors that made it pay off were:

    * I didn’t activate the Kyushu pass until the third day of my trip, when I actually traveled somewhere (but this feels like common sense lol)
    * I zig-zagged across the island and took the Yufuin-no-mori twice (so went Kumamoto – Nagasaki – Yufuin via YNM – Fukuoka via YNM)
    * Took a spontaneous day trip from Fukuoka that would’ve added cost.
    * Traveled every other day. So I’d have one travel day/one day rest/one travel day essentially.
    * With the Setouchi pass, just going Fukuoka – Kobe (the only journey I actually had to do) wouldn’t have paid off, but the one I did do of Fukuoka-Hiroshima (plus Miyajima ferry)-Onomichi-Kobe did work out financially. I found this journey very easy to pay off vs the Kyushu one.

    The only catch with doing the regional passes is that I wanted to go to Kita-Kyushu during a day when my Kyushu pass was valid, but the shinkansen for that section wasn’t covered by that pass, and I couldn’t fit it into the Setouchi section, so ended up skipping it.

    The new pricing scheme is difficult to pay off for the nationwide one, for sure, but if you’ve got a lot of stops over a long distance and/or need to double back on yourself a bit, it can fall in your favour.

14. The JR pass was worth it for us. Not hugely so, but definitely not break even. We did a round trip between Tokyo and kyoto (jr), day trip to nara (jr), narita express (jr), and a bunch of intercity travel in tokyo (not jr). We went in January 2023, when we went the JR pass was basically the equivalent of the Tokyo-Kyoto round trip plus the narita one way. So we got the nara round trip and one inter-tokyo train free

15. Made sense for me at the time. I went to Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Niigata within 2 weeks. I took every shinkansen i could take lol even the yokohama-tokyo route. It was well worth it imo.

    My trip to Hiroshima wasn’t planned at all, I just suddenly had some free days and just went “why not go to hiroshima? I do have a JR pass after all”. That was easily one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, and I wouldn’t even have considered going there if I didn’t have the JR Pass in the first place.

    EDIT: to add onto this, I’ve been to jp a bunch of times so i’m only in the usual cities (tokyo and osaka) just to meet up with some friends or for some electronics shopping, so it was a no brainer.

16. Rereading my post I can see I wasn’t totally clear. Until last year it was a laminated thing about the size of a passport. Very had to lose (which is good because if you lost it they won’t replace it). You couldn’t run it through a ticket gate, and there aren’t scanners or anything. You show it to a human that would let you through JR turnstiles. Now it’s a regular magnetic ticket. One that is worth hundreds of dollars, Very easy to lose, and can’t be replaced.

    We were sure at least one of our groups’ would get eaten by a turnstile before the trip was over but we made it.

17. Did the math and ended up getting a 7-day JR pass.

    The longest ride I did during that time was from Hiroshima to Tokyo on the Shinkansen. Covering that ride alone it saved me quite a lot of money.

    That said, if I didn’t have that long and expensive ride on my itinerary, I do not know if I could justify it.

18. Osaka-Hiroshima-Kyoto-Kanazawa-Fujinomiya-Tokyo-Pacific ocean coast-Osaka is worth it for 7-days-JR pass. Another 7 days are city trains and subways (and Kansai pass) and we found the way to make it work as it suits our needs the best and it’s far less than 14-days JR pass. I made an excel table and I counted every yen (not with the online calculators, they aren’t precise) of what would it cost us to buy each fare and we made a plan.

    ​

    PS.: I know it sounds like a lot but we’re very active and we like trains. I’ve also been to Japan so I know what I can do in a day.

19. We’ll be in Japan for 2 weeks. Honestly, the stand-alone tickets cost around as much as the JR Pass. It was a very small increase for us to get the JR Pass. One screw-up, one unexpected trip and it would be the same cost.

    I’m risk adverse, so I decided we should get the pass so it’s no longer a concern. Once the prices go up though? I wouldn’t get one.

20. My first trip, I got the 7-day. It was really a break-even, but at the time, it eased a lot of my worries about using public transport for a first-time visitor. I rode the Yamanote a lot as well. This was before the JR pass had an RFID chip, and I found just showing the pass at the gate very convenient.

    For my upcoming trip, it will actually save me money (about 13,000 yen). That’s about $85 I can spend on other things. What’s not to like?

21. Always used either the 7-day or local passes and at least for the old prices it was easy to justify with a shinkansen round trip + some local trains to smaller towns.

    Just earlier this year we used the 7 day pass to go Tokyo-Hakone-Kyoto-couple of day trips-Tokyo and saved around 5000 ¥ per person making it a pretty good and convenient deal.

    I don’t see the appeal of the longer passes though tbh.

22. I went to Japan on 2019 and the price for the 7days JR pass was covered really quickly, I took a shinkansen from Narita to Tokyo because I had to deliver some luggage there, then the same day I took another shinkansen from Tokyo to osaka used the pass a few days in Osaka and took another shinkansen to Kyoto, by the time I was in Kyoto the price was already been more than covered, I used it pretty little in Kyoto maybe next time I’d go from Osaka to Tokyo to give even more use to the JR pass but in my overall opinion it was worth it.

23. I spent quite a bit of time doing the math. For my trip next week it will save me $138. I’m still not sure about if it would have also saved me the reserved seat fee. And I don’t feel like I’m traveling all that much just four bullet train rides over 15 days.

    After October I don’t think anyone would buy it. You’d have to be doing a city a day or some craziness.

24. The pass also allows you to reserve seats in advance especially the luggage seats in the back of the train.

25. We did the math on the longer trains we would end up taking .. and found that they would cost more than the pass. We ended up using the pass for almost every train in Tokyo so it definitely was worth it for us. I think it depends on how far you’ll be going for your trip.

26. I just really wanted to ride the Shinkansen a bunch of times 🤷🏻‍♂️

27. I’m going through all of this myself right now. Got a 22 day trip coming up in November and my head is spinning with it all. Had a look on an online calculator of every city and day trip were taking and it suggests that it is borderline whether we save anything or not. I was thinking of buying it soon to get the current price because it’s my understanding that regular ticket prices are to be hiked up as well? Meaning if its borderline saving money now it certainly will if I get the pass at the current price and single ticket prices get spiked later?

    Isn’t travel fun? 😅

28. Did they increase the price? We got 7 days pass last time we were in Japan and it was like the price of Tokyo-Kyoto round trip. We did Tokyo-Kyoto + day trip to Hiroshima + day trip to Osaka and it wasn’t even a question. It was such a time and money saver for us.

29. One question then for those that don’t recommend the pass for a short trip. So I will be in Japan for 10 days at the end of October start of November and will split my time between Tokyo and Kyoto, and back. Right now what I was planning on doing was buying the JR Pass for 7 days via a travel agent to get a 90 day window to activate my pass while under the current price. So with that said, is there a way to get the Nozomi pass instead and how would I get it in the US. If that is not an option, what would I need to take for non Shinkansen trains to get to Kyoto from Tokyo and back?