Kanda Matsuri — luxury itineraries and concierge.

Kanda Matsuri, from an operator's side.

Kanda Matsuri belongs to Kanda Myojin and is one of the three great festivals of Edo. Its full form — the Shinko-sai procession, a long, formal column of court dress, mounted figures and shrine palanquins moving through Nihonbashi, Otemachi and Akihabara — is staged in odd-numbered years, alternating with Hie Shrine's Sanno Matsuri in even years. That alternation is the fact an agent has to work with: in the off year there is still a festival, but not the one clients have seen photographed. The dates fall in mid-May and move annually.

• The grand procession runs only in odd-numbered years, so a client asking for Kanda Matsuri in an even year is asking for something that will not take place in the form they expect.
• The route runs through central Tokyo's business districts on a working day, so the procession competes with ordinary city traffic and the good viewing points are office frontages, not festival grounds.
• Mid-May dates move with the calendar and are published by the shrine in its own time, which makes a fixed-date itinerary built months ahead a gamble unless the window is held rather than the day.

Basing decides the file.

Marunouchi, Otemachi and Nihonbashi put clients inside the route itself, which is unusual for a Japanese festival and worth using. These are also the hotels a corporate or high-end leisure client would want anyway, so the festival attaches to a Tokyo programme rather than dictating it.

When to start.

Nine months, and the first question is the year rather than the date. We confirm whether the grand procession falls in that year, hold the mid-May window, and firm the day when the shrine publishes — planning around an assumed date is how these files go wrong.