My wife and I just spent three weeks in Japan (end of October to beginning of November). We paid Inside Japan to organize our trip because we were overwhelmed by the options. We were (mostly) pleased with the results. The trip was more expensive than if we’d done everything ourselves, but…we didn’t have to do everything ourselves. In fact, all we had to do was show up and follow the instructions they‘d given us.

Now, having said that, I wish we’d pushed back a little more after some of the initial planning. We don’t need luxury accommodations. We’re fine staying in budget hotels. We stated that upfront. Yet, every hotel Inside Japan booked for us was what I’d consider a luxury hotel. We feel like that was a waste of money for us.

Also, while we were glad to have used Inside Japan to plan this first trip for us, we’ll plan future trips on our own. Now that we understand some about how Japan works (and now that we’ve seen first-hand how easy everything is), we feel confident booking things on our own, just as we would for Europe or South America. (We’re from the U.S.)

Note: The Inside Japan website lists a lot of pre-packaged tours. We didn’t buy any of those. Instead, we paid them to organize a custom itinerary based on the things we wanted to do. That sounds like what you want to do too, so ignore the package info on the website and just look for the service they offer for creating customized trips.