JR Pass – Do buy or not to buy

Hi, I just visited your site and is very informative about the use of JR Pass. However my travel plan is slightly complicated (I feel) and not sure if this JR Pass can really helped me to be cheapo.

8th Jan 2016 – Arrived at Narita – will travel to Osaka
8th to 12th will stay and tour around Osaka, plus a day trip on the 10th to Nara
12th will travel from Osaka to Kyoto
12th to 14th will stay and travel around Kyoto area
14th will travel from Kyoto to Nagano
14th to 16th will stay and travel around Nagano area for Ski and leisure
16th will travel from Nagano to Tokyo
16th to 22nd will stay and travel around Tokyo
22nd night departing back

I used hyperdia to check and roughly the price is around 44000 YEN if I’m not wrong. The JR Pass for 14 days is around 47000 YEN and not sure how to fix in the days to maximise or whether should I buy the pass.

Looking forward to your kind advice. Thank you.

For how long you are staying, I would consider buying the JR pass.

Just remember that you can use the JR Pass on all JR run lines of trains, busses and subways in all of Japan … ok with the exception of the three fastest Shinkansen trains on the three main lines. This will give you a lot of saved money that you can spend during your journey through japan.

It’s really unfortunate that you booked your fluight into Japan to Narita instead of Osaka-Kansai when you were planning to start there anyway (these days, forking flights are hardly more expensive than same-destination return, if at all). Apart from the NRT-Osaka trip, I would have said the obvious thing was to use the 1 week JRPass for the second week if it’s worth it (sorry, too lazy to do the maths, if you had listed in detail how your 44000Y sums up I would have bothered), where you have longer distance trips Kyoto-Nagano-Tokyo and use something cheap like the JR West Kansai pass (Y2300 for one day and up) or single tickets as needed for the Nara-Osaka-Kyoto area. Osaka-Kyoto can cost as little as around Y650 single trip (Hankyu)so that sort of distance hardly warrants a pass. Or for Kansai, consider the non-JR option: KANSAI THRU PASS (English) | Ticket&Goods | SURUTTO KANSAI which includes local transport (otherwise, in Kyoto a bus day pass costs Y500 already).

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