Trip Planning

For my graduation trip, I spent 3 days in Seoul and 9 days in Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka). I'm just gonna write out some of my loosely organized thoughts from the trip, just for the curiosity of the (hopefully nonzero) number of people reading and also as a reminder for subsequent trips.

I'm gonna make a more 'fun' post on the actual stuff we did later. This is just logistics stuff for anyone curious. All of this is somewhat Asia-specific, but I think it generalizes well enough.

General Advice

We travelled as a group of 3 for Seoul, and a group of 8 for Japan. Coordinating for a group of 3 in Seoul was fairly easy, especially since Wi-Fi and cellular are accessable and fast, and taxis are really cheap. Tokyo was a bit more challenging, but also not particularly hard.

Here are all the steps involved in planning a trip (in general), in rough order of how I think they should be done.

Step 1: Getting Your Roster

Okay, that's a kind of weird way to phrase it. But you should generally gauge how many people are going, and the interests/budgets/other information regarding those people. Since I just went with my friends, this was relatively straightforward.

Step 2: Making An Itinerary

So here's the thing: your itinerary is bound to change, due to a myriad of possible reasons:

That one tourist attraction you wanted to visit is actually closed on day X!
You couldn't get the ideal ticket for some attraction Y!
It turns out that your proposed itinerary requires two hours of transit and 30k steps!

Or a whole host of reasons. Like, it takes a lot of foresight and knowledge to nail the itinerary on the spot.

So, in my opinion, you should come up with an itinerary mainly to:

Roughly figure out what you want to do, and how long you want to spend doing it
Determine how many days you want to spend in each region (if it's a multi-legged trip like this)
Budget!

My general itinerary advice:

Don't micromanage everything! This is not really feasible for large groups, and also just doesn't seem fun to me.
Group items by geographic location or 'vibe', depending on what makes sense. For a place like Tokyo, you essentially have to group by geographic location.
Rather than micromanaging a list of activities to do sequentially, I would create a list of places to consider in each geographic area, and only 'fix' activities that require booking or are 'must-do' in your mind. This way, you get the structuring of an itinerary without the micromanaging.

Step 3: Booking Stuff (Hotels, Flights, etc.)

I don't claim to be some travel guru, because I'm definitely not. But I like to think I did a pretty good job securing flights, hotels, and making sure nothing wack happened.

Flights

Flights are less flexible than hotels in terms of booking. This is because the reserve-now-pay-later model doesn't really apply to flights: to my knowledge, flights mainly allow free cancellation until a day after you booked, and generally require payment upfront.

Some general tips:

Flight prices are usually best on Google Flights. You should also check Expedia and other sites, but that's usually the best.
The cheapest way to fly into Asia is through ZipAir, if they have a hub near you. Yeah. I don't think it's particularly close, especially when there's a sale. I mean, I got my one-way ticket from SJC to NRT (San Jose to Narita Tokyo) for like $270.
You should generally reserve flights sooner than later. But for ZipAir or other airlines that frequently run discounts on routes, holding off is sometimes a good idea. I saved like $130 bucks by procrastinating on booking my return flight because I got lucky with a ZipAir sale. But I doubt this is true for most traditional airlines.

ZipAir specific:

ZipAir is pretty good on most aspects. The seats are fine, and they have StarLink Wi-Fi. And it's fast! I downloaded a movie on it.
However, ZipAir's customer service is allegedly not the best. This is just allegedly; anecdotally, staff were fine.
ZipAir's luggage rules are really strict. They have a 7 kg (15 lb) limit on all of your carry-on luggage. Meaning that if you have a carry-on suitcase and a backpack, the sum of their weights cannot exceed 7 kg. So, you really need to be careful! I think they'll still let you through if your backpack is overweight, but I'd forget about bringing both a suitcase and a backpack on carry-on. Also, getting a checked bag is really expensive, so I'd just bring a huge suitcase if you can handle lugging it around.

Hotels

I lowkey spent way too much time researching this. So uhh, here are my recommendations:

Choosing a hotel:
- First, unless you are super decisive, I'd come up with a list of possible hotels. Then, compare prices, amenities, and locations.
- Chances are, amenities won't matter as much. At least for Japan hotels, having an onsen was cool. But otherwise, just consider room size, locations, and pricing. You generally won't be spending a huge amount of time in the hotel anyways.
- For Asia specifically, I would really advise against sharing beds for group travel. This is hotel specific, but is probably true for most places.
Booking the hotel:
- Incognito, search up the hotel on Google and use the prices from there. This strategy works especially well with Agoda. Expedia and official hotel websites don't GAF.
- People on Reddit often advise to book hotels directly. Personally, I think that for most competent hotels, just go with whatever's the cheapest. But this could just be an experience thing.
- Note that Expedia (and Booking.com, since one owns the other) include tax and fees. Agoda and others don't. Make sure to consider that.
- You can probably take advantage of many hotels being reserve-now-pay-later, since this often allows for free cancellation.

Attractions

Check official site and all authorized resellers. Klook is chill, in my experience. If you're booking something hyper-competitive like Shibuya Sky, make sure to book it on the dot.

Also, just a thing that annoys me about Klook: the time you get to fill out visitor info isn't 'reserved'. So you have to fill out all visitor information super fast to get the tickets. In the future, you should load that info in advance.

Step 4: Actually Going On The Trip

Airport Stuff

I'd recommend getting a digital boarding pass whenever possible. It makes your life way easier, and also can update if gates change. If your airline allows you to easily get one, you should get one.

Also, know the general basics of what TSA cares about. If you're flying to China, you can kiss your non-3C compliant power banks goodbye. I lost three power banks to them. Yikes!

Plane Rides

Uhh, bring ANC headphones, have water, and enough snacks. Airline dependent. If you don't have ANC headphones/earbuds, earplugs suffice. Learn how to depressurize your ears. Yeah.

Budgeting

Each person should budget for themselves, especially when shopping is a factor. For our trip, we just thugged it out on a spreadsheet and used Zelle. DO NOT RECOMMEND.

Use an app like TriCount. At least, come up with some system that minimizes transactions and confusion. Here are some possible systems:

A smarter spreadsheet system that can use math to calculate net IOUs. I'm not spreadsheet savvy, but there's probably some way that allows for an IOU-matrix to be made.
Have one person to be a bank. But I don't think most people would be jumping for this role, since being the debt collector sucks.
Request to split the bill whenever possible. This isn't really an option in all scenarios though.

IMO, Zelle is usually the easiest way to pay people back, since having a bank account essentially means having Zelle.

Conclusion

That basically wraps up all my thoughts. A lot of this is subjective, but probably true enough in most cases.