It is prime tourist season in Japan but I didn't realize how far reaching the effects are; even small towns and non tourist destinations are affected; not sure why, overflow? Last week I visited Chiba, a good size city but not on the typical tourist itinerary like Kyoto or Tokyo. I stayed 2 nights (check out Friday) thinking, since I was staying at a Japanese business hotel, there would be no problem extending my hotel reservation through the weekend if needed. Wrong! Turns out this time of year tour buses with hundreds of tourists descend on just about every town with a hotel on the weekends so I had to check out Friday and didn't have another reservation for the weekend.
No problem I thought, I'll just use hotels.com to find another hotel in Chiba or nearby town; what I didn't count on was that just when I needed my phone to access hotels.com, I maxed out on my SIM card's data plan. When I entered Japan last month I purchased a 3 month, 2gb data plan so I was surprised On reaching the limit after only 3 weeks; I didn't know how to check my usage so was caught by surprise.
No problem I thought, I'll just use the hotel's computer to find another hotel. Luckily this hotel had a computer I could use (not all do); however, non-western hotels, especially outside major cities cater to the Japanese business man. This means hotel staff speak very little to no English and the hotel computer is in Japanese and has a Japanese keyboard. Lesson learned for international travelers - note the position of signin icons and important login info on google and other frequently visited pages because, like me, you might have to navigate through Japanese pages before you can see your gmail or other info in English.
After successfully navigating through Japanese login pages on google I was reminded by Google that I was using a computer they didn't recognize so wouldn't let me login without verifying it was me. The problem is they want to call or text you, neither of which are an option when your phone isn't working:)
After a long while I finally got to the English version website of hotels.com only to discover it wouldn't let me book a hotel because it couldn't validate my payment info - credit card. This was puzzling since I've been using their website (via my phone) for the past 2 months to book about 15 hotel nights in 2 countries without a problem and had not changed cards or any info in my profile.
So I tried calling hotels.com and learned one can only make room to room calls from one's hotel room phone in a Japanese business hotel; one has to go to the front desk and ask them to make outside calls for you. So after being connected to hotels.com I ran into the same problem, they couldn't accept the same credit card I've been using with them for the past 2 months and have been using for several years. They suggested I call my bank but with the 16 hour time difference it was then 3am in Colorado.
So I set my alarm for 1am Japan time/9am Colorado to call my banker (couldn't just email my bank because I couldn't get into gmail - see above:). To make a long story short, it turns out Chase said they had a very old address for me in their system. Why this didn't present a problem for the previous 2 months of charges to various vendors and why they had this old address (3 houses ago) instead of the correct mailing address (which i verified with them before leaving in my trip), is something they couldn't explain. Very strange.
Anyway, by the time I cleared up this mess, it was getting down to the wire; the hotel room I previously tried to book was now gone as we're all hotel rooms in the area. So I had to move to tokyo where there are lots of hotels; albeit expensive, especially same day bookings. But I found one and am therefore in tokyo at another western hotel where a very kind concierge spent almost 2 hours with me figuring out how to recharge my sim data card.
This kind of stuff could be stressful if I were on a schedule:)
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