mymatemarmite

We're going to Japan in November so I thought I'd familiarise myself with the Lawson ticket site a month in advance (their tickets go on sale 10am Japanse time on the 10th of the month before they're on sale for). I got through to what should have been the pick your date/time page (it says so at the top) but there was nothing to actually click on!

Did anyone actually successfully get Ghibli tickets through Lawson? JTB only have mega expensive tour+museum tickets, if we go through Willer for the walking tour it's not cheap ($167 for a family of 4) but cheaper than JTB, but would like to not pay for a tour we don't want if i can help it.....any thoughts?

Mara

I just went through to the point where you have to log in, etc. The October tickets are almost sold out. If you want to get the November tickets I would advise you to go online at exactly 10 am Japan time on October 10th.

I have never bought a ticket for Ghibli but I have for other events - and I always go online the minute the sale starts if at all possible. I bought a ticket for the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo a couple of years ago, and the tickets for that particular month were sold out very quickly....

Also if you have a credit card that might reject a foreign charge I would call them first or else if the charge is rejected you might end up losing the reservation.....

russ_in_LA

I just thought I'd answer the OP's question, since I just finished with my purchase. The good news is that I did manage to get 2 tickets for late November, although the process is infuriating.

I was all ready on the site before tickets went on sale today at 10am Tokyo time. For almost a solid hour, I consistently got messages saying that there was excessive internet traffic and to try again, however, on at least a dozen instances during this time period, I did make it to a screen asking me to choose a date and time, and then to enter my email address and phone number, which is the last step before payment, but every time I did this, the system crashed and I had to start the entire procedure over. I finally had to give up as I was late for an appointment.

When I got back home, I saw that there were still 3 times available during my 4 day stay in Tokyo, all on different days. I tried two of them and got a message indicating that the sale could not go through, and that I should try again, reducing the number of tickets (I was only trying for 2). As before, this message didn't come up until I had selected the quantity, the date, the time and entered in my email address and phone number. When the sale did not go through, the entire process had to be redone, an insanely frustrating system. In the end, I did get 2 tickets for two hours after my arrival in Tokyo, which will be a challenge, but at least I got them. The moral of the story is, on the day that tickets go on sale, make sure you have enough time to keep at it for a couple hours if need be. I was lucky, but it appears that they have sold out for the entire month is less than 2.5 hours.

mymatemarmite

In response to my own post, we managed to get our tickets last night as well but just like Russ above it was a case of going over and over, every time we finally got to the next stage there were no tickets left. Everyone I assume does what we do and try for as early as possble, in the end we managed to get 4pm tickets on one of the days of our stay in Tokyo which is a shame as we'll only have 2 hours, but I think we'll show up early and try our luck and wander round the park if they insist on a 4pm entrance.

Also don't refresh the page, sometimes it just took ages to load even though it looked like it wasn't loading - but def get online bang on at 10am Japan time!

russ_in_LA

So glad you got tickets too! Just curious, but what did the page say once it had loaded? 8 times out of 10 I would get an error message. The rest of the time it would say "too much web traffic, try again later", and then more rarely, I would get through to the screen to enter email address and phone number, before crashing and then another error message.

mymatemarmite