Kyushu Itinerary in Sept/Oct

Hi All,

Came upon this website and found it extremely helpful. I planning my first trip to Kyushu. I will be flying into Fukuoka September 24 and will have 2-3 weeks in Japan (departure city likely Tokyo; date tbd). I'd like to get some hiking around some lush green scenery, and then get some writing done in nice small town without lots of cafes within walking distance. I have a $50 USD daily budget for lodging and food. Other expenses like travel and attraction fees I don't keep a limit.

What is the best way to transit through Kyushu?

I Originally planned to spend 3 nights in Fukuoka and fly down to Yakushima Island for another 3 nights, and then work my way up to Beppu, Aso, Amakusa Island, Nagasaki, back to Fukuoka.

However, I noticed the JR pass is increasing cost October 1. Would it be better to buy a Kyushu pass upon landing in Fukuoka September 24, and make my way exploring northern Kyushu for the first week? Then buy a second Kyushu pass on September 30 and make my way south? I am travelling solo but will have one large check-in size suitcase.

Thank you for all your help in determining an appropriate Kyushu itinerary.

Arrival :Fukuoka Airport on sep 24, 2023
Departure From Japan: Tokyo

I strongly suggest you to buy JR nation wide pass 7 day =29650 yen before oct 1st,2023
So you can go from kyushu to narita airport on mid october by old JR pass. After 1st oct, you need to pay 50000 yen for 7 day pass

Oh, so I don't have to use/activate the pass the moment I purchase it? I can save it's use for a later period?

FUK-NRT in Mid-October is 10,000 Yen. It still seems cheaper to fly to Tokyo.

Regarding my trip within Kyushu, do you suggest to fly Yakushima from Fukuoka, or buy JR pass and start using immediately and work my way from the North to the South by train? FUK-KUM is $115 on JAL.

Unless you plan well. That daily budget will be difficult.

Those Kyushu passes also need to moving fast for them to pay off.

Really decide if Yakashima is a must. It's alway time consuming to get there. When there are equally good places to travel.

Based on the comment, it looks like Kyushu pass may not be worth it, but perhaps fly directly to Yakushima and then get a 21-day nationwide JR pass before October 1?

I really want to get out into a green forest and hike, and so I don't mind going down to Yakushima as I have 2-3 weeks in Japan. Where else do you suggest has good hiking spots?

My suggestion is
Day 1,2,3: buy Fukuoka subway 1 day pass = 640 yen cover fukuoka airport to downtown (3 nights in fukuoka )

Day 4:Buy SunQ bus pass 3 day =11000 yen cover fukuoka, beppu ,kagoshima etc

Day 5:visit kagoshima by sunQ bus pass from fukuoka bus terminal ,You can go yakushima by ferry from kagoshima.SunQ pass valid on kagoshima to sakurajima port by ferry

I don't really understand your budget tbh, you have an extremely restrictive daily budget for food and accommodation that will be a huge challenge to meet yet no limit on travel.
On that budget you'll be limited to staying pretty much only in mixed dormitory hostels, maybe that's what you had in mind? Otherwise, only in some locations would a hotel room be possible.

I would look at how much your budget for the entire trip is and plan accordingly.


It's not clear to me if you want to only spend part of your 2-weeks in Kyushu or if you want to go to Honsu as well. You could easily spend 3 weeks in Kyushu, it's very beautiful with so much to see but travel with public transport can be slow in places. Yakushima is fantastic but not so quick or cheap to get there, hiking is lovely in Unzen peninsula, Aso, Kirishima etc.

I won�ft comment on your itinerary per se, but will share a couple of lessons I have learned in recent years:

(1) You may already know this, but when you look for hotels (or cheaper forms of lodging, but especially hotels), make sure you see a breakdown of costs per night before you choose (or eliminate) a particular property. Nearly all lodging establishments have a Saturday night �gupcharge�h, but the degree to which it varies by property is quite significant. I�fve seen places that have extremely low rates on weeknights but then the rate is triple for Saturday! On the other hand, a few places only charge 15% more for Saturdays, or sometimes (rarely) even have the same rate all 7 days of the week. (As for other non-Saturday nights, the variations can be significant; sometimes Friday is also quite high, sometimes Sunday is lower than Monday, etc.). The point of all this is that if you find a property you like but the total cost is above your budget, look at how it breaks down before you rule it out entirely. In planning an upcoming trip, I have been carefully �gdodging�h Saturday upcharges (which quite naturally tend to be higher in popular tourist destinations), and saving quite a bit of money as a result. I don�ft like making a lot of hotel changes and I prefer to stay several nights in a row in one place (which means I don�ft like to change just for a Saturday night). But if tweak my itinerary to adapt to the hotel situation (rather than fixing an itinerary in stone and then trying to find cheap hotels for those cities, regardless of day of the week), I can save money. It becomes quite a puzzle if you want to spend time in places like Fukuoka (or especially Kyoto, Tokyo, and Yokohama), but if your lodging budget is that low, it could be helpful. Another trick is to stay in places that are off the tourist radar map but close to a JR station, especially if you have a rail pass.

I have found that some booking sites don�ft reveal the cost per night for the rooms; they only give you a total price for the stay. I find this maddening, and don�ft even use those sites to look for hotels.

(2) Although it might seem more efficient to have one large suitcase, it is a lot easier to have two medium suitcases, for example a medium rolling suitcase plus a duffel bag or large tote bag with a �gsleeve�h that makes it easy to put it on top of the suitcase and roll around. On the shinkansen, if you have too large a suitcase you have to reserve a space for it, and even if it is below their limit so you don�ft need a reserved space, it could be hard to get onto the luggage shelf above the seats (it might fit, but could be very heavy to lift). Large suitcases can also be very unwelcome on local transit such as commuter trains and buses. Also, it can be impossible to find coin lockers that will hold a large suitcase. And if you have two pieces rather than one, it is easier to occasionally use takuhaibin (luggage delivery service) to get some of your stuff out of your hair while you are traveling around. Of course, you will want to make sure your airline gives you two free checked bags, but many of them do.

Regarding rail passes, I have spent hours (and hours�c) analyzing the various regional passes including the JR West passes and the JR Kyushu passes, and finally decided that for my upcoming trip the nationwide pass is the winner hands-down. Of course you would want to buy it before October 1. But it won�ft be for everyone. Using regional passes and flying from Kyushu to Tokyo is indeed an attractive option, not only because of the low cost of the airline tickets but because of the time saved. But be sure the fares you are seeing are actual, bookable fares on dates you really want, and also don�ft count on low-cost airlines (or even regular airlines) to get you to Tokyo just a day before your flight. Even trains can be impacted by bad weather, but planes are especially vulnerable. Low-cost airlines are notoriously unreliable anyway.

I plan to spend 2 weeks in Kyushu and the third week is flex.

I do plan to stay at hostels. Not my preference but it seems like hostels run $20-$30 and the next rung up is a budget hotel room for ~$60. I feel like food and lodging costs are controllable and if attractions are too expensive, well I can just spend a day doing nothing but reading, relaxing or hiking.

I plan for this to be a slow trip, not a whole lot of moving every other day. I also prefer to spend multiple nights in a single accomodation. If I need to adjust my budget for accommodations please let me know what would be more realistic.

Rather than setting a budget based on what people think is reasonable, why don�ft you start trying to book rooms? If you�fre arriving in less than a month you should be doing this anyway. I started booking rooms for a November-December stay in July, and some of the places I have booked are no longer available for new bookings, especially consecutive night stays, especially if they include a Saturday.

I think that 7000 yen per night for food and lodging is possible if you eat very cheaply and search hard enough, but you have to be willing to put some time in if you want to get the best possible rooms. And you may need to look outside of the city center of your main destinations. If you just start doing a quick search for whatever is the cheapest option in your destination cities, you might end up with a hostel and possibly not a very nice one (the best hostels will have booked out long ago), but if you�fre willing to stay 10 or 20 minutes away by train, you might be able to get a decent business hotel room for the same price. You just have to be resourceful and think outside the box in some cases.

If you want to make things a lot easier on yourself, you could increase your budget by 2000 yen or so per night.

Kim, are you suggesting to plan based around affordable accommodations around/within preferred destinations, book the appropriate nights per lodgings, and then figure out how to get to these places?

Well, I almost always pick hotels that are close to a JR station because I usually have a rail pass. If you want to extend your reach (admittedly, being close to JR really limits your options), then it gets considerably more complicated. But basically I go through an iterative process of looking for hotels at or near places I want to sightsee (or hike, or relax), and figuring out the transit. For example, I recently monkeyed a lot with a short segment visiting the Kii Peninsula between Kyoto and Okayama. I originally had a two-night stay in Kushimoto, then I changed to one night each in Kushimoto and Kii-Katsuura, and finally ended up with three nights in Kushimoto. All of this took the (infrequent) timing of trains in that area into account, as well as concerns about the impact that rain would have, and also I had to compromise with a hotel that was a mile walk from a JR station (or else a cab ride). This all took quite a while to figure out but I saved about 15,000 yen by arriving in Okayama on a Sunday instead of a Saturday, and I came up with a plan that will work even if it rains two days in a row. And I will enjoy the extra night in Kushimoto. (I cut a night in Osaka out of my itinerary later in my trip so I still kept the same number of nights in Okayama.) There were several other factors that I took into account (including luggage management and apparent quality of the hotels, based on reviews). I started with a rough idea, looked at many possibilities, and kept fine-tuning until I achieved (hopefully) a perfect solution. It�fs like a big puzzle.

Well, you asked�c If you are arriving in less than a month, you would have to devote most of your time between now and then to perfecting your itinerary if you want to get optimal prices on your lodging. But I will reiterate that one of the most important things is to look at what price the properties are charging for a Saturday. It can really be a budget buster, whereas if you can make a small tweak you can often dodge the impacts. And choosing home bases that are off the tourist radar map and using a JR pass to �gcommute�h can also save you a lot of money. Since you don�ft particularly want to stay in big cities and you want to relax anyway, you should be able to come up with some locations that fit the bill. I don�ft have any particular suggestions for Kyushu, plus my own time is exhausted planning my own trip :) but for example I noticed that Kumamoto seems to have some nice hotels in my price range (which is above yours); it seems to be cheaper than Fukuoka (but I didn�ft look below my own range).

As an example (and then I promise I will shut up!), one scenario I am looking at for a February trip, for four nights that has to include a Saturday, is to stay in Kumamoto near the JR station (and not in the downtown area). Then I might take day trips to Kagoshima, Nagasaki, and Aso (despite difficult local transit there that I haven�ft fully researched). This is with a JR pass that covers all of Kyushu (neither the North Kyushu nor the South Kyushu will get you to both Nagasaki and Kagoshima). But this might not suit your hiking/sightseeing aims at all and the train times might be too much for you (not for me). There is a new hotel near Kumamoto station that tickles my fancy, and their Saturday upcharge is not outrageous. But it�fs well above your price range. Possibly look at Toyoko Inn; most people would prefer it to a hostel (but some people like hostels better).

You could look into renting a car. We did this and it was the best thing we did. Did a loop of Kyushu from Fukuoka - Nagasaki - Miyazaki - Mt Aso - Yufuin - Fukuoka and all place in between.

We hired a car through one of the major rental companies but I know there are smaller rentals in Japan that are a LOT cheaper. You won't get the newest latest car though. Worth looking into.