Online seat rez with JR East Pass purchased in person
I purchased 2 JR East Passes on eki-net.com and successfully booked two seats on a particular route for travel one month from now. I would now like to reserve another seat with us, for my elderly mom who will buy her own JR East pass in person in Japan.
When I try to book this seat (Under "Customers using a pass", I click on "Seat Reservation" > Under "Passes purchased elsewhere", I select JR East Pass (Tohoku area), search by station (as I did with the seat reservations made with the "passes purchased on this site"). But the same train now says "The number of available applications for this route has been exceeded, making it unavailable." There were plenty of available seats. I presume the system is preventing me from making this reservation because I already have a reservation for that same date and time.
We need to make several other train seat reservations (one of them on the Resort Shirakami) and if at all possible, it would be helpful if I could book my mom's seat reservations in some way to avoid her having to get all the dates and trains and seats correctly matched up with ours at the Midori no Madoguchi and deal with all the paper tickets. (For those that may suggest waiting to make these seat reservations in person once we're all in Japan, as I understand most shinkansen routes in Tohoku this time of year wouldn't warrant it: our train travel/trips begin the day after we land from the US, and we would like to be on specific trains for various scheduling reasons and would like to ensure we have seats together on them.)
Has anyone ever had to do this and done so successfully? Wondering if I can get around this by creating a second login (if the system allows this) and making her matching seat reservations through that? (Guessing that may work if eki-net "attaches" reservations by membership number?) Or if it has to be a different person's account, wondering if my husband (who won't be traveling with us) can set up the account and make her reservations? But then wondering how the reservation ticket pick up works if he's not with us. The last option would be to have the other person traveling with me to set up account and book the reservations, but that may be quite cumbersome to coordinate.
Thank you in advance for any experiences/feedback for dealing with this!
You can book seats together by having your mom purchase the same pass online or purchasing one for her yourself. Why does she have to buy a pass in person in Japan?
She was going to buy the pass in person because she is already there. She's definitely not going to be able to manage buying the pass online herself. I was thinking of purchasing it for her online, but I read that everyone had to be together for pass pick up, and we were going to start/activate our pass at Narita to use the N'Ex, so that wouldn't have worked. I wonder if the system would let me buy a 3rd pass separately for her - is that what you were suggesting? But I wasn't sure what proof she would need to pick up her pass herself (if I purchased it) and whether there could possibly be any problems with that. She can get flustered pretty easily and I'm trying to avoid causing her any unnecessary stress. Thank you for your input!
If anyone can confirm whether if the system allows me to buy a 3rd JR East pass online, whether it will then allow me to book seat reservations for the 3 of us? (right now, it's hard coded to only allow 2 seats, since I have previously purchased 2 passes together.) Thank you!!
>> I was thinking of purchasing it for her online
This approach would be the easiest for your mom.
>>but I read that everyone had to be together for pass pick up
not true.
After meeting your mom in Tokyo, bring along her passport to redeem the JR EAST pass and reserved tickets.
refer to - How to pick up your pass / reserved seat ticket
https://www.eki-net.com/top/tr/guide/receive/
I purchased my pass on 3rd party site and have encountered “seats not available online” for the pass but the trains were not actually full. I ended up booking those trains at the station. So it’s not because of you using the same login to book for your mom.
It is best to buy her pass online. You can set up a new account for that. Then for sure she can pick up her pass on her own.
Pass pickup requires print out of the confirmation email, and her passport.
Thanks to all those who responded. Since we didn't have all the necessary information at the time (and needed to book those Resort Shirakami train seats asap), she ended up going in and buying her pass in person. I sent her our reservations (that I booked on eki-net) and she had someone at the JR service center reserve her seat with us on each train.
For anyone else who tries to book the Resort Shirakami (BOX) seats in the future, please note that they sold out within a few hours of reservation opening for certain legs (for travel on a Monday). Though when I checked those BOX seats for the previous few days, they were still available. So it just depends, but be aware of that possibility.
Thanks again!
