My unpleasant experience of Odakyu Limited Express "Romancecar"

Holiday should be fun and the last thing you ever want to experience was being accuse cheating of ticket by train officers at station where you in fact pay the full amount and more.

My story begin with My wife and my son age of 3 and I travel from Shinjuku to Hakone on Romance car express.


On our trip from Shinjuku, my wife bought 3 tickets although children under 3 is not require to pay. My wife wanted my son to have a comfortable seat for his own. upon exit, all 3 tickets was collected by the machine at the station. Remember this fact here as it is important for my story later.

From there we have round trip tickets of 2 from cable car to ship at Hakone which was a package. My son is 3 thus need not have to pay the tickets.

Now when returning from Romance car from Hakone to Shinjuku station. My wife purchase 3 tickets which are 2 adults and 1 kid. Now when we exit the station of Shinjuku, we were stop by the station officer claiming that we did not pay for ticket of my child for going from Shinjuku to Hakone. We explained we did but the train ticket was collected at Hakone.

The officer claimed we only pay 2 tickets for the cable car and ship thus assume we did not pay for the ticket going there which incorrect as we did paid.

We try to explain for 15 minutes against such accusation in as simple English as we can as we did not speak Japanese. They still insist that we cheated and have to pay 500 Yen for the child ticket from Shinjuku to Hakone.

We are not the only one who have been stop as other foreigners with kids and even without kids were stopped to ask to pay more. It is really ridiculous. To stop wasting time as it is late, my wife just pay the 500 Yen in cash to them. The officer return the changes but they did not offer any official receipt.

I guess we are not the only one having this experience from the trip and by sharing my experience here will hopefully provide some knowledge of what to expect so traveller are more prepared from such incident.

If you have similar experience from the train station staff, do comment here.

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