Originally Posted by
fivenue
we plan to spend around a week or so, and basically exploring Japan from Tokyo down to South/West area.
Possible places to stop by /stay over is (from the further left) Fukuoka, Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo.
However, these are not final, and am open for exploring other cities.
Basically, based on our plan, we'd arrive in the evening, around 8pm-ish, want to see what would be the best option.
based on the suggestions in the earlier post, we can either:
- go straight to nagoya (or even Fukuoka?)
- spend the evening at nearby non-starwood hotels
I'm hoping to stay within Starwood properties and use points.
In your case, it all hinges on what 8pm-ish means. The last Shinkansen Hikari (the type you'd take with a rail pass) leaves Shinagawa station at 10.07pm. To catch it, you'd have to catch the Airport Express train at 8.44pm. Frankly, I would not recommend the Westin Nagoya option unless you arrive at NRT by mid-afternoon.
Given your itinerary, I'd think the best option by far would be to stay at one of the NRT airport hotels, and then fly to FUK the next day. This is a long trip even by Shinkansen, and while there's a certain fun novelty to riding the train from Tokyo to Osaka (it's exciting to see the landscape zoom by), it gets boring from Osaka onward (mostly tunnels). Note that there isn't a Starwood hotel in Fukuoka; the closest one is Hiroshima, about an hour by Shinkansen (I'd stay at the Grand Hyatt in Fukuoka instead of commuting to Hiroshima).