By Declan BarryIt's been a while since our welcome post, and if you've been putting off planning your Japan trip until it felt less overwhelming, now's a good time to come back and look around.
Start with who you actually are as a traveller
If you don't quite know where to begin, there's now a quick quiz that gets past the usual "top 10 things to do" advice and asks what kind of trip you're actually after, quiet mountain towns, neon-lit cities, food you'll think about for years, whatever it is for you. It matches you with a traveller type and a shortlist of cities that genuinely suit it, and you can send that straight into the planner if it feels right. Takes a couple of minutes, no account needed.
Or just browse a finished trip
Not everyone wants to answer questions first. If you'd rather see what a good trip actually looks like and adjust from there, we've built out a library of real itineraries, first trips, return trips, food-focused trips, slow trips, that you can open and start editing immediately. Nothing about them is fixed once you've loaded one in, change the dates, swap a city, stretch it longer, it's yours from that point.
A planner you can actually talk to
If you've got Adventure+, you can now ask Tabi-Kun things directly instead of clicking through menus, "can we spend an extra night in Kyoto", "is this day too packed", that sort of thing. It'll suggest the change and let you decide whether to keep it, it won't just go and rearrange your trip without asking. It stays focused on your actual plan too, it won't invent a place that doesn't exist or start recommending a specific hotel to book.
Somewhere to put your hotel, and a way back if you mess something up
You can now drop your actual hotel into the planner once you've booked one, and your days will start to plan themselves around it a bit better, mornings closer to it, dinner nearby. And if you move something and immediately regret it, undo is there now, so a wrong click doesn't mean redoing half your day by hand.
Two tools worth bookmarking even before you've decided anything
The JR Rail Pass Calculator is still one of the most useful things on the site if you're trying to work out whether a rail pass is actually worth it for your route, it'll just tell you plainly, worth it, close call, or skip it.
And if timing matters to you, cherry blossom, autumn colour, fireworks season, the Seasonal Forecaster will tell you roughly when a place is at its best, and Discover now has its own quiet little section showing you what's actually in season right now, only when there's something genuinely worth mentioning.
The kind of detail that actually changes a decision
We've spent a good amount of time making sure the things you see about a place are honest rather than just decorative. If somewhere needs booking weeks in advance, that's flagged clearly wherever you see it, not buried somewhere you might miss it. Entry fees show a real number where we have one. If a place has wheelchair access, or doesn't, we only say so when we're actually sure, we'd rather leave it blank than guess wrong about something that matters. And restaurants now show at a glance whether they're vegetarian, vegan, or halal friendly. City pages also give you a real sense of the weather across the year, not just a vague "best time to visit" line.
Planning it with someone else
You can bring other people into your trip now, they can suggest changes, move things around, add ideas, but you're always the one who decides what actually sticks. Nobody can quietly wreck your plan while you're not looking. And if you're on Adventure+, you can send any day straight to Google Maps to actually walk it, no re-typing every stop into a new app.
Wherever you're reading this from
The blog and our city guides now read in a good number of languages beyond English, and no matter where you're browsing from, things like currency and dates should already look right without you having to change anything.
And the small stuff
If an article actually helps, you can say so with one tap now. And if you ever get stuck on anything, our support chat is there, it actually knows the site properly, and if something's genuinely a "talk to a real person" situation, like billing, it'll say so and hand you off rather than pretending it can help.
That's the round-up. If something feels off or missing, let us know, most of what's here started with someone telling us exactly that.