Friday April 26 -
This is our check-out day. Our flight home is not until 00:30 Saturday morning so we have a 9:00 pm pickup time for our airport transfers. This gives us the whole day and early part of our evening to be in the parks. For our
AbD group, there were varied pickups from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00pm and a few who are not leaving until Saturday.
We plan to store our bags with Bell services. A note in our hotel check-in materials requests that we call guest services to request a pickup of our luggage for storage if bags will be stored later than 1:30 pm. We did this and the process went smoothly - made the call, left the luggage in our room, checked out on the TV since we had no room charges ( if there are any charges to your room then you must check out at the front desk) and we are off to the parks.
We decided we wanted to be back in the lobby an hour before pick up as we didn’t know how long it would take to get our luggage. No worries - it was only 5-10 minutes, and they took the bags to the front of the hotel to wait for our transfer, so we did not have to sit with them.
I should note that we were the only departure at the hotel that time of the evening; it might take longer If things are busier with more people leaving around the same time. The hotel note about checkout also said their busiest times are around 8am and again around noon or so and to allow extra time if needing the front desk or bell services around those times.
We were not sure how we would find our driver for the airport transfers but no worries - he came into the hotel lobby with the familiar orange AbD sign and a paper with our names on it, same as had greeted us upon arrival. He was there 15 min ahead of our scheduled pickup time so I was glad we had come back to the hotel a bit ahead and had already retrieved our luggage.
Transfers were slick - no traffic at 8:45 pm, & we were at Haneda Airport about 30 minutes later. The driver got a luggage cart for our bags, gave us directions to the checkin floor of the terminal, and we were on our way.
At the airport, we checked our luggage, got our boarding passes, and then went through security - no TSA PreCheck here, we didn’t have to remove shoes but did need to pull out info the bins any liquids as well as laptops & tablets, and had to remove jackets. They do have the same size restrictions for liquids on toiletries, and we could not take a large bottle of water through with us.
If you have purchased any items that were eligible for tax-free, stop by the customs counter to have the paperwork removed from your passport. Then go through immigration where you get your exit stamp & you can head to your gate or lounge. Whole process from checkin and luggage drop to our gate was less than 30 minutes.
At our departure gate, we were asked the questions we can get at checkin in US airports about contents of carryon, have we left our bags unattended, are we carrying anything for anyone, etc. We were also asked about electronics and whether we had purchased them in Japan. We got a blue sticker on our boarding pass. There was a gate announcement that some passengers might be flagged for additional TSA screening prior to boarding, so this may be where TSA PreCheck comes in handy as our boarding passes here have TSA PreCheck on them.
Next post, some additional observations, hints, tips, etc.