I enjoyed the people and the polite culture in Japan. After returning from my trip I wrote the following review and never received a response. I would not use Unique Japan Tours again. Hello Darina, Here are my thoughts on our recent Japan Discovered small group tour from May 11 - May 25. We chose UJT because the cities visited were what we wanted. We loved Japan, and would like to return there. Overall, the tour was good, but not as good as I had hoped it would be or as good as other group tours we have taken. First, the positives: The travel pack that was sent out pre-departure was very helpful. It increased our anticipation of our upcoming vacation along with very helpful practical information. Before our departure, Michiko and the staff helped us to make some minor changes in our itinerary. We left the group in Kyoto one day early to go to Hiroshima to go to the Mazda factory tour (I made the reservations 9 months earlier) and they arranged separate train tickets and an extra night in a Hiroshima hotel. We met up with the group the next day when they arrived in Hiroshima and everything went very smoothly. Michiko also helped arrange tickets for a Tokyo Giants baseball game and Sakura gave them to us. We also arrived a day before the tour started and they arranged an extra night at the Tokyo hotel. Our tour leader, Sakura Kakimoto was wonderful. She was always so very helpful and cheerful and kept the group together, letting us know what the schedule was and what to expect. She always asked the group what we were interested in and tried to meet our needs. She did a great job. She always had our train tickets and admission tickets available and helped to make everything run smoothly. She was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. The buses were always on time and very nice and clean and the bus drivers did an excellent job, even in challenging rainy conditions. They are to be commended. Some of the hotels and ryokans were of very good quality and we appreciated that. We liked the Hotel Okura Tokyo, Kanbayashi Hotel Senjukaku and the Iwaso Ryokan. Overall, the service in Japan was excellent and we enjoyed that. I don’t want to post a negative review that will hurt your business, but I did want to share with you the things that I think can make the tour better. 1. I had some problems with payment on your website. First, I was double charged $100 AND 100 Euros. After that was cleared up, I had to make an additional payment for our Hiroshima extension and I was charged 345 Euros instead of $345. Initially, they told me that I had selected the wrong currency, but I showed them that I had selected dollars and they refunded me the difference. I don’t know if it’s a glitch in your computer system, but I was incorrectly charged twice, and had to ask for the refunds. 2. Upon arrival, we were not met at the airport for transport to our hotel. Not being able to speak Japanese, it was very difficult to get help, find a telephone, etc. I was not expecting to use my cell phone on this trip and did not have an international plan and did not even know how to make a call in Japan. A very nice airport representative helped me to get change (we had to walk to the women’s restroom on the other side of the airport) and then to use a pay phone to call the UJT emergency number. They tried to find the UJT representative and a number of calls were exchanged. They called me back on my cell phone a couple of times and this resulted in $15 of roaming charges on my cell phone. They told me to to go ahead and take a taxi to the hotel, but the person meeting us finally arrived more than an hour later. Apparently, the driver had been there the whole time, but the person meeting us was very late. It is very disconcerting to get off a plane in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and to not have someone there to meet you. This has never happened to us on any of our other many international trips. 2. Our tour guide in Hiroshima, Naoko Koh was excellent and we really learned a lot from her and enjoyed our day with her. I would say that al the other tour guides were pretty mediocre in terms of their knowledge and affability. Our only other experience with group tours has been on Tauck, where every tour guide in every city was truly outstanding. This was disappointing and perhaps something that can be improved upon. 3. Two of the hotels, the Takayama Green Hotel and Karasuma Kyoto Hotel were very disappointing. The carpets were very dirty, the rooms smelled bad and the bathroom in Kyoto was so tiny as to be almost unusable. We were not expecting 5 star accommodations, but compared to the other hotels on the itinerary, it just did not meet the same standard of quality that I would have expected. While the Hotel Okura Tokyo was very nice, its location in the business district was disappointing. It would have been nicer to have been in Shinjuku or someplace a little livelier. Perhaps, instead of staying there at the beginning and the end of the tour, it would have been nice to stay in another part of Tokyo at the end of the tour. I hope you find these suggestions helpful and that they can be used to improve your tour business. We did fall in love with Japan and can’t wait to return there. Best regards, Teresa Flory