Nada no Kenka Matsuri — luxury itineraries and concierge.

Nada no Kenka Matsuri, from an operator's side.

The fighting festival of Matsubara Hachiman Shrine, in the Shirahama district of Himeji, runs on 14 and 15 October. On the second day three portable shrines are carried at a run and slammed into one another, while enormous gilded yatai floats are hoisted and swung by teams from the surrounding villages in a walled arena on the hillside. It is loud, genuinely physical and nothing like the restrained processions clients will have seen in Kyoto. It is also, unusually for a festival of this character, properly organised for spectators — the arena has paid seating, and the file lives or dies on whether that was secured.

• The collisions happen fast and at ground level inside a packed arena, so an unseated client sees a wall of backs and hears something interesting happening on the other side of it.
• Seating in the arena is finite and sold ahead through local channels; it is not a matter of paying more closer to the date, because by then there is nothing left to pay for.
• Himeji's hotel stock is thin at the top end and the festival dates coincide with strong autumn demand for the castle, so accommodation is contested by visitors who are not there for the festival at all.

Basing decides the file.

Himeji keeps the transfer short and the castle on the doorstep, but its rooms are limited and ordinary at the top end. Kobe is forty minutes away with genuinely good hotels and a city worth the evenings, and on most luxury files that trade is the right one — provided the transfer on the second day is private and planned rather than left to the trains.

When to start.

Nine months, driven by the arena seating rather than the rooms. The seats are handled locally and early; the hotels in Himeji and Kobe are recoverable later, and the seats are not.