Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

Tour and activity cards on this site link to GetYourGuide, which is the only booking network live here. If you book after clicking one, the platform pays us a commission out of its own margin — your price is the same as going to the platform directly. Links to a temple's, museum's or castle's own ticket page are never affiliate links and carry no tracking of any kind, which matters more in Kyoto than in most cities: almost every temple sells at its own window for less than any packaged alternative.

Who does what

We compare listings and link out. The platform takes your payment, issues the voucher and handles customer service; the company named on the listing runs the actual tour, walk or transfer. If a departure is cancelled or a guide fails to show, that is resolved between you, the platform and the operator under their policies — we have no standing in that conversation and cannot refund or reschedule anything.

Buy at the official office rather than through any platform for Nijo Castle's Honmaru Palace, which is sold only by the castle's own web reservation at $6.25 (¥1,000), and for the everyday temple gates — Kinkaku-ji at $3.13 (¥500), Ryoan-ji and Sanjusangen-do at $3.75 (¥600) — where no reseller can beat the window and nothing sells out. Guided walks, workshops, tea ceremonies and the coach day trips are the opposite case: those are genuinely worth booking ahead, and that is where the links on this site go.

What the commission does not buy

Placement, ratings, wording. Nobody has paid to appear on this site or to be described in a particular way, and no operator sees a page before it is published.

The test is on the pages themselves: several of the most-read pages here send you to an official ticket office that pays us nothing, and recommend skipping a guided option that would. Where a tour is worth its markup we say why in the same terms — time saved, a room you cannot otherwise enter, a queue you cannot otherwise skip.

Ratings and reviews

Every rating and review count shown on a tour card is the platform's own published number, read on the date printed with it. We calculate no rating of our own, this site carries no aggregate rating of its own in its markup — it has no reviews — and we write no testimonials. Quoted reviews are short excerpts kept as published, with the source.

Prices

Tour prices here are the lowest adult rate on the listing at the last check, and ticket prices are the official rate on the institution's own page at the date shown. Both move: platforms reprice constantly and Japanese museums adjust admission by season and by year. The figure that counts is the one on the checkout page before you pay. When it disagrees with ours, the checkout is right and we would like to know.

The nightly bands on the neighbourhood pages are a separate thing again: they are the middle half of the rates a hotel search returned for one midweek night, read on the date printed beside them, and are there to compare areas with each other. They are not a quote, and they move with the date you pick.