Kickstart Your Trip to Tokyo with a Local: Private & Personalized

This review is long overdue, but I wanted to leave an excellent rating! It was our family of 5's first trip to Japan and I was worried about navigating Tokyo. We had a list of places to visit on our 10 day trip and wanted to get a good start with the intimidating transportation system, so I booked the "Kickstart Your Trip to Tokyo" tour. Our tour guide, Patrick, met us at our Shinjuku hotel and I had emailed the items and places that we would like to cover the first day. After introductions and a quick review of the itinerary, we started down the list. First, Patrick helped us to arrange for transfer of our luggage from our first hotel to our last hotel. We would be traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto and then back to another Tokyo hotel and did not want to lug our suitcases to Kyoto. Most of the staff at our hotel spoke some English, but I wanted to make sure that our suitcases could be transferred and held until we arrived at the hotel. Patrick spoke Japanese and helped to confirm our request. Patrick also speaks French, German, and some Korean well. His English is great too! Next stop was to the Japan Rail office to reserve our tickets for activation (on another date) and to reserve our seats on the bullet trains for our trip to Kyoto and back. The staff at the JR office spoke perfect English and we would have been able to explain what we wanted to do, but Patrick helped to confirm everything. Outside the office Patrick helped us to purchase our Suica cards and we caught our first "regular" train to Shibuya. He showed us how to navigate with Google maps and to determine the different routes, placement numbers to wait at for the train, and how to reroute if you catch a different train. We had read about the crowds of people and variety of shops in the train stations and would have been lost and distracted for the whole day at the stations if Patrick did not gently try to keep us on schedule. After our tour of the Hachiko dog statue, Meiji Jingu shrine and the famous Shibuya crossing, we enjoyed a nice lunch and some shopping. Patrick guided us back to Tokyo and directed us back to our nearby hotel. Would we book this tour again? Absolutely! We would have eventually figured out how to navigate the train system, but coming from a place that public transportation is not used, it was nice to be able to ask questions and learn more quickly to "jump start" our list of things to see. Patrick also taught us a lot about the Japanese culture.