I tried to get tickets for Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea prior to leaving for Japan, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to. From the Tokyo Disney website, you have to register for an account and every time I tried to register or login I was supposed to receive a verification email. The link in the verification email would never work. After clicking the link the page would try to load for a long time, and then show an error message. I tried a number of times, but it never worked.
I also looked at activity/tour websites, including Klook. I found out that with Klook you could purchase tickets and pick them up, but only two days before the date you would be visiting the parks. I was hoping to pick up the tickets at their counter at the airport, but we would be arriving three days before our trip to the parks so it wasn’t an option. They do have stores around Tokyo, but the locations didn’t quite work with our tentative schedule and I didn’t want to make an unnecessary trip just to pick up the tickets.
After a bit more research I found out that we can purchase park tickets at certain Disney stores within Tokyo. Based on their website they had a few locations around the city, so I decided that if we were near any of the stores we could stop and get tickets, otherwise we would just have to get them at the park the morning of.
One of the stores was located in Shibuya, so while we were there we decided to stop in. It was later in the evening, but there was still a long line for park tickets. We found that queuing in Japan was quite common, however a lot of the places were pretty efficient in ensuring that the line moved quickly. The Disney store was one of the better ones. One of the workers was going through the line to discuss the ticket options and then wrote the order down on an order form that you took to the register. While waiting in line you were able to decide what tickets you wanted. The line went very quickly.
While in the line I requested tickets to both parks over two days. Unfortunately all tickets were sold out for Christmas Eve. The workers said that we can just show up at the park early, before the open, and purchase our tickets there.
We decided to do that and then started to leave the store. As we were leaving we decided that we should at least get tickets for Christmas Day. It didn’t cost that much more to buy the tickets separately, and if we got lucky they may be able to give us the discounted rate when we were at the park purchasing the park tickets for Christmas Eve.
We went back to the end of the line – the line was very quick so it wasn’t really an issue to wait a second time. We purchased our Disneyland tickets for Christmas Day.
In hindsight we probably didn’t need to worry too much about getting tickets, it was pretty easy the day of. We just didn’t want to take any chances and we really wanted to be at Disneyland on Christmas.
On Christmas Eve, we arrived at DisneySea before they opened. There was a massive queue to enter the park (for those that already had tickets) and a shortish line for those purchasing tickets. The line ended up taking a while because ticket buyers were discussing package options.
When it was our turn, we thought we would see if there were any options in getting the two day park discount. The lady at the counter didn’t speak much English, but she understood what we were asking and it was a very easy process. We paid the difference for two days and went on our way into the park. We were both impressed with how easy it was to get our second day ticket at the discounted price.