This tour to Japan was my 6th with smarTours. I choose you because of your moderate prices, interesting itineraries, excellent accommodations, good tour guides and efficient organization in general. My tour to Japan was everything above with one exception: tour guide. Ms. Yuko Takagi, our tour guide, was a nice person, but very mediocre as a tour guide. She did good from the organizational point of view, head count, making sure that everybody was on time, etc., but very poor as a guide whose responsibility, I believe, is to introduce tourists, who came to his/her country for the first time, at least briefly and in general to the country's geography, history, art and culture, politics, education, health care, statistics, etc. In every city we expect from a tour guide to point the interesting sights, museums, theatres, to recommend which sights to visit in our leisure time, where it is good to eat. We also expect to understand guide's English without difficulty. To my regret Ms. Yuko Takagi didn't meet this requirement. Although her English vocabulary was satisfactory, it was very accentuated, not always coherent, repetitive. We spent 10 days together, part of the time on the bus which could give a good opportunity to talk about Japan or a city that we were about to see. This was not done. Yes, there were bits and pieces of information necessary, but not sufficient, to understand the temples we're about to see. I believe that smarTours should maintain certain, high enough level of professional tour guiding adequate to smarTours reputation and itineraries. From my experience people who buy your tours are highly motivated, intelligent, educated capable to appreciate a coherent, knowledgeable introduction to the country they are visiting. I still cannot forget excellent guides in Israel, Jewel of Adriatic, Cambodja, China, or my friends' account about an unforgettable professional guide in South Africa. I think that smarTours should select the tour guides so that they will maintain its reputation the same way as you select excellent accommodations. But comfortable hotels and buses are not enough. For tourists a tour guide is a representative of a country we visit, its face. And we want to fall in love with him/her the same way as we fall in love with a country that we see for the first time.