---
title: "Where to stay in Tokyo"
description: "Four Tokyo hotels across three very different bases — Shinjuku, the bay, and the old east side — with the guest complaints stated as plainly as the praise."
url: "https://travelshifu.com/hotels/tokyo/"
type: "hotel city guide"
source: "TravelShifu"
---

# Where to stay in Tokyo

Four Tokyo hotels across three very different bases — Shinjuku, the bay, and the old east side — with the guest complaints stated as plainly as the praise.

## Verdict

Base yourself in Shinjuku unless you have a specific reason not to — it is the busiest interchange in the world and it turns a sprawling city into a twenty-minute one.

Two of the four properties below are within a kilometre of Shinjuku Station on our hotel data provider’s own figures, which is what makes them worth the room size you give up. The bayside option buys you space and a pool and costs you a change of train; the Ryogoku tower buys you the old east side, with Skytree at 1.2 km and the sumo hall at 0.2 km.

Room size is the recurring complaint across every Tokyo property in the sample, not a fault of any one hotel. Three of these four carry "small rooms" in our hotel data provider’s own guest analysis. Budget for a standard Tokyo double being smaller than you expect and the rest of the stay looks a lot better.

None of these pages quotes a nightly rate. We hold no live rates for these properties, and a price baked into a static page is stale within a day — the CTAs go to the partner so you see the real number for your dates.

## Which area of Tokyo is best for a first visit?

Shinjuku. It is the busiest rail interchange in the world, which means most of your journeys are one train rather than two, and the area itself has enough food and nightlife that you never have to travel for dinner. The trade-off is that Shinjuku Station is famously hard to navigate for the first day or two.

## Are Tokyo hotel rooms really that small?

Generally, yes, and it is the single most common complaint in the guest data across every property we sampled. Three of the four hotels on this page carry a room-size complaint in our hotel data provider’s own guest analysis. Bayside and resort properties are the exception — they were built with more space per room.

## Should I stay near Haneda or Narita instead of in the city?

Only for a very early departure. Both airports have good rail links into central Tokyo, so an airport hotel costs you a commute on every day of your trip to save one transfer at the end of it. If your flight is before about 08:00, an airport-side room is worth it.

## Is Odaiba too far out to be a good base?

It depends on what you came for. It is genuinely separated from the rest of the city by water and our hotel data provider’s guest analysis for the property there names "location far from attractions" as a recurring complaint. What you get in exchange is bigger rooms, a pool and a bay view, which is a fair trade for a family and a poor one for a four-day sightseeing trip.

## Why do you show a guest score but no stars in Google results?

The scores belong to the supplier, not to us. Google’s review-snippet guidance says not to aggregate ratings from other websites and that ratings must come directly from your own users, and we host no first-party hotel reviews. So we show the supplier’s number visibly, with its source and the date it was captured, and we never emit it as structured data.

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