10 day Japan adventure - Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima

[JoshuaL1997]

Intro to my solo trip to Japan

Hello, or should I say Kon'nichiwa. I'm writing this in the lounge before my ANA flight taking me to Japan for the first time. Having covered my Europe trip last year (which was my first ever trip report) I thought I'd make this a regular thing when I travel. While much of it may have been covered before in other trip reports, maybe this report will give an updated perspective for anyone else looking to head to Japan in 2025 on a solo trip.

I'll be covering my return Business Class flights with ANA between Sydney and Tokyo, navigating transfers between the domestic and international terminal in Sydney, Accommodation in Tokyo and Kyoto, Train passes and general day-trips and activities including loads of restaurants during my 10 day trip to Japan and loads of tips and tricks along the way.

To start off, this trip came together thanks to a great points buying promotion in September last year with Avianca's frequent flyer program: Lifemiles. I'll cover some basics of the program and the ups and downs of buying and booking with this program (trust me there's a few).

So stay tuned for trip report instalments, I'll write when I have a bit of down time so apologies in advance if I post in dribs and drabs.

 

[JoshuaL1997]

Buying points and booking flights with Lifemiles

Theres plenty of content online about lifemiles, you can even find a few threads on this site about the program. Like with most things people will have different opinions on the program, ranging from its the worst, most dodgy miles program out there to its the very best, don't use anything else.



Lets start with the positives, points are accessible without flying or taking out another credit card. Don't get me wrong I love making the most of my CC points but let's be real you'd have to open a new card every 6 months to get enough sign up bonuses to take a holiday. Lifemiles along with Aeroplan (Air Canadas program) are some of the only accessible programs (and not priced in USD) where you can frequently buy heavily discounted points no matter where you live.

Lifemiles regularly runs bonus points offers with the best usually being the 200% offer which seems to come around once or twice a year, most other offers throughout the year range from 135-180% bonus points and you can see a history of offers thanks to @onemileatatime just below, much like your local mall it seems theres almost always a sale. The lifemiles offers do often have a staged approach to the bonus meaning the bonus is larger the more you buy.



In my case I had to purchase 30k points to unlock the 200% bonus which meant for $1600 I purchased 30k + 60k were gifted bringing us to 90k which happens to just be the right amount for a return trip from Australia to Asia. Odly, Lifemiles charges 50k for a flight originating in Oz but only 40k for the return leg.

The other up shot is that Avianca does have access to a large amount of reward seat inventory with Star Alliance airlines, but importantly not all of them. Singapore Airlines for instance does not release reward seats to most of its star alliance compatriots including Lifemiles. Most of the reward seat availability for Business class seems to be with Lufthansa, Swiss, Thai and ANA. United limits its premium reward releases to 30 days prior to departure for partners this includes Lifemiles sadly.

The down side (and theres a few) of the program is that just like its points, its infrastructure is cheap. Firstly searching for seats through its website is a giant pain in the backside. Many travel influencers recommend you just call the call centre as it saves you the hassle of dealing with the fiddly website but alas the program only has a local Columbian phone number to call meaning your phone bill is most likely going to cost more than the points. If you are a US based influencer thats not going to be an issue though as there is also a dedicated US phone number to ring.

So for those of us who are stuck on the website, will find that even when the little calendar tool indicates that there are seats on a given route that thats often actually not the case once you hit enter. This is the main reason why I have just ignored this program for many years and stuck to Aeroplan, but as it turns out when I checked the website during that 200% bonus period last year I suddenly managed to find seats on the SYD-HND route with ANA and on the MEL-BKK route with Thai both in business. Having been to Thailand multiple times and never to the land of the rising sun, I made an impulse decision to buy points and book a flight to Tokyo.

This was somewhat nerve wracking because you have to purchase points prior to making a booking meaning there is this slim chance that between you seeing available seats and buying points, someone else has potentially already snagged the seats up. Luckily this didn't happen to me and there were often 2 seats (one on each of the two daily flights) available for several weeks in June and beginning of July of 2025.

The last obvious downside is that you really have no client support post booking. So should something go wrong you can really only rely on your travel insurer to help you out.

Ultimately buying points does come with some risks and clearly there are a fair few point hackers who are getting some awesome trips out of the program. I have more faith in the Aeroplan program personally but ironically Aeroplan almost never has any ANA reward seats available other than very last minute seats.

Anyhow, onto the flight...