Akasaka Prince Hotel - Fit for Presidents
Written: Oct 09 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent service, beautiful room and view.
Cons: Room service meal was disappointing.
The Bottom Line: Beautiful hotel with excellent service. Rates are reasonable for a luxury hotel, but eat out.
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| philipchu's Full Review: Akasaka Prince Hotel |
When I checked into the Akasaka Prince Hotel (part of the Prince hotel chain), I overheard the woman next to me requesting the room key for the President of Madagascar. It turned out that the Tokyo International Conference on African Development was taking place, which explained the police and Japanese and African plainclothesman patrolling the lobby.
So, feeling like part of the unwashed masses in my t-shirt and jeans, I followed the bellboy carrying my duffel bag to the 26th floor and was introduced to a large and immaculate room with a splendid panoramic view of the surrounding city. The room featured an elongated sofa beneath the window and a similarly stretched desk with a 20" Samsung flat TV monitor perched atop. The channel selections include a couple of English stations (BBC and CNN) along with the local Japanese stations, plus the typical pay-per-view fare. Amusingly for someone from the US, the "In Theatres" movie selections have left theaters in the states several months ago. Nintendo 64 games and internet access, with or without your own laptop, are available for a fee.
There aren't many cultural sites in the immediate vicinity - I didn't see the Hie-jinja shrine or the Suntory Museum of Art, but I highly recommend checking out the 400-year old garden at the New Otani Hotel next door - the garden is on the grounds of a former castle and is still surrounded by a moat.
Aside from the garden, my touring consisted of a long walk down the Aoyama-dori road to Shibuya (to visit the statue of the famously loyal dog Hachiko) - I realized halfway down that I would have been better off using one of the nearby subway stations (I arrived at the hotel via the Nagatcho station), but there are plenty of shops, restaurants, parks and Buddhist shrines on the way. I rested my feet at Playstation Square - a Sony building where the public is invited to stop in and play video games.
If you want to save your yen, get your food outside the hotel. The numerous in-house restaurants list typical fare at $35 on up (according to my internal currency converter), so I restricted myself to snacks from the hotel convenience store and some tasty $15 sandwiches from the cafe. I splurged on one room-service sashimi meal, which didn't cost more than the restaurant meal but was disappointing in quantity and variety. And the teapot looked like it had a few too many rusted-over layers of crust on it.
Laundry service is also expensive, at something like $3 a shirt (double that for two-hour instead of overnight service), and the convenience store doesn't carry much besides basic underwear and dress shirts.
However, at $180 a night (including the built-in ten percent service charge in lieu of general tipping), I had a fantastic room better than anything I could get at comparable rates in New York or Boston and the courteous service was a delight to experience. The staff speaks English well and accomodated my questions well from check-in to check-out (note also that you leave the room key with them whenever you leave the hotel premises) and booking a limousine bus to the airport. On future trips to Japan, I may try out different hotels, but I will always keep the Akasaka Prince in mind as a fine default choice. Maybe next time I'll try talking to one of the diplomats.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
philipchu
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Member: Phil Chu
Location: Huntington Beach, CA
Reviews written: 60
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:
writer of software and prose
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