MIKE AND JESS' TRAVEL DIARY
Tokyo Trip
Day 1 - October 14 2024
Overall, the travel experience getting into Tokyo was one of the easiest we have experienced for international trips. Other than an hour delay on our first flight making the connection a bit tighter than we would have liked, everything was smooth and we felt much better physically than past trips. I think our typical trips involved us being awake for 30 plus hours since we can’t sleep on planes, whereas this time it’s only going to be about 24 hours.
Anyways, after we got through customs and immigration, we stopped by the “Limousine Buses” kiosk in the airport. They aren’t as swanky as the name suggests, but for only $20 a person for our route, an hour and a half ride on a nice clean bus certainly beats taking three train/subway connections with all our luggage. Thankfully, I found out online ahead of time, they have a bus line that goes directly to our hotel…the DISNEY TOY STORY HOTEL!! We are starting the trip off with a bang! When researching for this trip, we knew we had to hit the two Disney parks in Tokyo.
PSA: Very long ramble about how we decided to experience the next couple Disney days ahead. Skip to the next section if you do not care. 😉
From everything we had read, these parks in particular go hard on the food and attractions. The general consensus in the Disney global crowd is that the Tokyo DisneySea park is the best Disney park in the world. The two parks here, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea, are both significantly larger than California Disneyland, with DisneySea doubling the size.
Initially, the plan was to stay in a downtown Tokyo district like we will be in for the rest of the trip and train to Disney both mornings. However, the train travel would be 90 minutes minimum and the Toy Story hotel was the same nightly rate as the hotel in the city and is off the main Disney monorail 10 minutes from the park, so we decided to go that route.
In addition, our research informed us that Tokyo DisneySea opened a brand new land with 4 unique rides in June. Since the Tokyo parks are so popular, they are not able to just open the land as usual, letting anyone with a park ticket in as the land would get overrun. So, they limit the amount of people allowed in the new land.
Side Note: Nowadays, there’s no more “fast passes” that you have to run to attractions to obtain (which let you to skip the line and go to the front of the ride.) Instead, Disney uses mobile app services so you can get Priority Passes, buy Premier Access passes, or get a standby pass to wait in the line physically. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of it all, but I bring this up to explain our choices when booking this Disney portion of the trip.
To get into the new land, Fantasy Springs, you need to either (1) Be staying in the ridiculously expensive new hotel built in the land ($1,000 plus per night) (2) Get lucky enough to secure one of these passes just mentioned on the mobile app before the others ahead of you the second you enter the park (you can’t try to obtain one until you are physically inside the park, the app GPS tracks your location) or (3) You purchase a vacation package. The second option is the only free/cheap option. However, even if you are lucky enough to obtain a pass for a ride within the new land, the ride pass lets you walk in and see the new land, but only ride the ride you got the pass for-within a short window of time that you don’t get to choose. It’s bananas.
When we looked at the rides we had most interest in for this park, most were within the new land. So, we decided to splurge. It’s our 10 year anniversary after all!
We got a vacation package that included a night at the Toy Story Hotel (cheapest Disney hotel), two park tickets for each park, some limited series gifts, unlimited drink ticket, breakfast at the hotel, and a Fantasy Springs Passport. The Passport allows us unlimited access to the new land, entering and exiting any time, as often as we would like and it gives us front-of-the-line access to every ride in the land as many times as we want. Since we wanted to spend 3 nights, allowing us to wake up and go to sleep on-property for the full two park days, we booked the hotel for 2 additional nights on each end of the package.
Whew, that was a lot!
When we got to the bus kiosk, they let us know the next available ride was in 11 minutes. Otherwise it would be over an hour for the next, so we grabbed it! Was able to squeeze in just enough time to get some money exchanged. The bus was a super great choice and the hotel is so cute!! Very kid-oriented but we decided we would let ourselves act like children, so we belong too. 😉 The room is adorable and impeccably clean and new (the hotel is only a couple years old).
The hotel has a little convenience store inside it with a bunch of pre-made food items or things like cup noodles, since the rooms have counter kettles in them. We had initially planned to take the monorail to their downtown disney mall within the resort area, but I was super tired. I talked Mike into getting a bunch of random foods there and having a room buffet instead of heading back out for dinner! We got a great haul!
One more fun hotel room thing to share…the shower is a ROOM! Like, a walk-in closet sized room, but that’s the shower as well as the bath. It was WILD!
We are winding down finally and hoping to get some long rest. We are starting off with Disneyland tomorrow. We have “Happy Entry” as a perk for staying in the Disney hotel and it allows us into the park 15 minutes before normal guests, so we can basically get a ride or two in without a wait. So, we will be up early and ready for a full day at the park!