Tokyo airport transfers.. and why six of us aren't getting the train

The gap between the best and worst way into Tokyo is about £161, an hour and a half of your life, and fighting through crowds in multiple train stations with all of your luggage. Like a lot of major cities, Tokyo is home to two airports, and they’re nowhere near each other. Check which one you’re flying into before you book a single thing, because the answer to “how do I get into town and how much is it” is completely different for each.

There are six of us flying into Narita on 3 October, landing at 17:35 and heading for a hotel in Shinjuku, and rather than just booking the Airport Limousine Bus everybody recommends we sat down and priced up every option we could find. Some of it was genuinely surprising, and one bit of it is the reason we’ve ended up not getting public transport from the airport at all.

Nothing here was gifted or hosted. These are published fares we looked up on 7 September 2026 rather than tickets we’ve already used, so treat them as research until we’re back, at which point we’ll come and update this with how it actually went. Some links are affiliate links.

First things first, which airport?

Haneda is the close one, sat down on the bay about twenty minutes from the middle of town, and Narita is the far one, a good 60 kilometres east and in a different prefecture altogether. Both of them say Tokyo when you’re booking, which is how people end up landing at the far one without realising. It’s worth keeping in mind when you’re booking flights but it’s unlikely the price of transfers will make a dent in flight prices for most people.

It isn’t a disaster if you’re at the further out airport, it just means getting into town becomes something you book in advance rather than something you sort out at the airport.

The bit that makes the numbers make sense

We need to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges. So before we compare anything it’s worth thinking about how comfortable you want to be, how confident you’ll be navigating public transport in a new city & how many bags you have. The trains and the buses drop you at a station and then leave you to it, so if you’re staying in Shinjuku and your train terminates at Ueno you’ve still got another train and a change to go, with all your bags, at whatever time of day you’ve landed. The taxis and the private transfers take you from the arrivals hall to your hotel door, you’re paying for convenience.

Everything below is in yen, because that’s what you’ll actually be handing over, and I’ve put pounds next to it converted at ¥215.12 to the pound, which is the rate as I write this.

Narita, if you’re happy to get yourself to a station

The Skyliner is the one everybody recommends and having read a fair bit about it we can see exactly why, because £11.70 for a reserved seat that gets you to Ueno in 41 minutes with proper luggage racks is hard to argue with. The low-cost bus at ¥1,500 is the one to look at if you’re not in a hurry, and the Limousine Bus is the interesting one of the four because rather than dumping you at a station it runs to the lobbies of a load of the big hotels, so depending where you’re staying it might be the only one on this list that’s actually door to door.

Haneda, where there’s barely a decision to make

If you’ve landed at Haneda then honestly, get the monorail and don’t think about it any harder than that, because £2.40 and thirteen minutes into Hamamatsucho just isn’t worth over thinking. The Keikyu line is even cheaper if Shinagawa suits you better, and the only reason to look at anything else here is if you’ve got a lot of luggage or you’re arriving at an antisocial hour.

Narita door to door, which is where it got interesting

We priced up a private transfer on Klook for our actual arrival, six of us, Narita to the hotel in Shinjuku:

£69.95 for a seven seater, flight tracked, driver waiting, all six of us and the bags in one vehicle. Then out of curiosity we opened Uber at Narita to see what the same journey would cost if we just rocked up and ordered one:

¥36,230, which is about £168, and that’s the Premier which only seats four, so two of us would be ordering a second car. The Uber taxi option runs between ¥35,719 and ¥43,637 depending on traffic, and the official airport taxis work on fixed zones somewhere in the region of ¥29,000 to ¥32,500, so call it £135 to £151 before any night surcharge. Whichever way you cut it, booking the car in advance rather than ordering one on the day comes out at roughly half the price for more than twice the seats, which we genuinely double checked because it looked like a mistake.

Top tip - the £69.95 seven seater says six passengers but only four bags. Check the little luggage icon as well as the people one, because it’s the one that’ll catch you out at the kerb, and it’s the reason we’ve booked a 10 seater car for 6 people.

So what have we booked?

The private transfer, and specifically the ten seater at £82.69 rather than the £69.95 one, because six of us and six suitcases going into a vehicle rated for four bags was only ever going to end with somebody holding a case on their knees for an hour, and we’d rather start the trip comfy than a tenner better off. Split six ways that comes out at £13.78 each, which is only a couple of quid each more than the public transport, an absolute steal! At the end of the Skyliner we’d all be stood at Ueno at gone seven in the evening with six suitcases working out which line goes to Shinjuku, whereas this way somebody meets us and drives us to the door. For two of us travelling light I’d probably get the train, but it’d be a tough call. For six of us after two long flights it’s a no brainer.

If you’re getting in late, everything changes

If your flight gets in late then it’s a bit trickier, because the last N’EX leaves at about 21:44 and the last Skyliner at around 22:30. Miss those and you’re down to the late TYO-NRT bus, which has a last departure around 23:20 and gets into Tokyo Station about 00:38 for roughly ¥3,000, or a taxi at ¥29,000 with a 20% night surcharge stacked on top of it, or a bench until the first train at five in the morning.

That’s the difference between a £14 transfer and a £180 problem, and a bit of bad luck with the departure time or at baggage reclaim can ruin the whole plan. If you’re landing at Narita much after 21:00 then book something before you fly, or book a night at an airport hotel and go into town fresh in the morning, because working it out at the taxi rank at midnight is how you end up spending £180.

If you’re flying in to catch a ship

Yokohama is the cruise port for Tokyo, and it changes the answer completely because you aren’t going to Tokyo at all.

£3.70 from Haneda to the pier is comfortably the best number on this whole page, so if you’ve got any say in which airport you fly into and there’s a ship waiting for you, that’s the one. We haven’t sailed out of Japan ourselves so I’m not going to pretend to know anything about the ships, but the rest of our cruise stuff is where we do actually know what we’re talking about.

Final thoughts

If there’s two of you and you’re not hauling much, get the train, and the Skyliner at £11.70 or the Haneda monorail at £2.40 will do you nicely. If there’s a group of you with a pile of luggage then price up a private transfer before you assume it’s the expensive option, because we assumed exactly that and were pleasantly surprised. And whatever you do, don’t leave a late Narita arrival to sort itself out.

We’ll come back and update this once we’ve actually done it on 3 October, and if the transfer turns out to be a waste of £82.69 we’ll say so, because that’s rather the point of all this.

Prices are what was published online in September 2026. Things move, so check before you book.

Prices are what we paid in September 2026. Things move, so check before you book.