Photo: First Cabin Hotel
Japan is known for its innovative (and weird) hotel industry. But the country that brought you hotels with robot dinosaurs as receptionists and ladies’ crying rooms also is famous for the crammed spaces of its capsule hotels. Now, it appears a new wave of tiny hotel rooms is arriving in Godzilla’s hometown.
Tokyo only has around 100,000 hotel rooms, and only 7,600 are slated to be added over the next three years, according to Reuters, which could make things difficult for a city that plans to welcome 20 million visitors by 2020, when Tokyo plays host to the Olympics. One possible solution? Converting old office buildings into hotels, which is, by far, cheaper and faster than building properties from scratch.
From Reuters:
Sankei, a unit of Fuji Media Holdings Inc, which owns the conservative Sankei newspaper, converted a 35-year-old office building in Tokyo’s electronics-geek district of Akihabara into a hotel in under a year and for less than $8 million.The hotel, called Grids, charges 3,300 yen ($27) a night per person for a bunkbed and up to 5,000 yen ($40) for premium rooms with tatami mats.By comparison, the average room rate at Tokyo’s lowest-ranked business hotels has risen 11.7 percent from a year earlier to 9,500 yen, according to STR Global.
Grids has some competitors, including First Cabin, which opened last year, offering converted office cubicles for 5,500 yen ($44). It may not sound like much, but this new take on the capsule hotel is a welcome addition to an already expensive and crowded city
